Witek at The Armory Show (Sept 8-10)
Joan Witek (b.1943) “Edward Teller’s Dream [P(S)-12],” 1982, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 68 x 110 in (172.7 x 279.4 cm)
SECCI
The Armory Show
Booth 330
September 7-10, 2023
Javits Center
439 11th Avenue
New York City
SECCI will present historic works from the 1980s by Joan Witek. At the center of the installation is the nine-foot painting Edward Teller’s Dream (1982)—a painting inspired by an apocalyptic dream of Edward Teller (1908-2003), known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.”
During the early 1980s, Witek created seminal works that sought a kind of purity—a purity defined exclusively by her singular use of oil stick and graphite on unprimed canvas. Captured in Witek’s singularity is the play among surface, texture, proportion, and edge. Works from this period encapsulate the gesture and expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism into a measured calculated mark. While the look of her compositions may be representative of the cool “what you see is what you get” aesthetic of minimalism, Witek’s approach to abstraction is rooted in expressive narrative sources.
“I wished to reconcile abstraction and feeling,” Witek told John Caldwell, curator of her 1984 survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
“The irony of the work… is in appearing to be simple and easily grasped visually while an ongoing language of proportion and content proceeds through each work. Each painting depends on the others for interpretation. They are a handwriting. Although the writing style is relatively uniform, each picture has a uniquely based origin in my emotions or wherever a particular painting comes from. Its themes are the art of painting, or my perceptions of the world, or the renderings of my insides.”
Installation view: Joan Witek: Paintings, 1980-1983, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, March 3-April 29, 1984.
Edward Teller’s Dream (1982) is a painting titled after the acclaimed Hungarian-American physicist known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.” As a brilliant theoretician and scientific genius, Edward Teller was central to the atomic bomb research working alongside Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project—the United States’ effort to develop the first nuclear weapon.
For Witek, the genesis for the painting is described in her studio notes about having seen the Teller documentary that aired on January 22, 1980 called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb. The film and the discussions of and around Teller were “maddening,” wrote Witek. At the end of the program Teller delivers a haunting poem, which Witek transcribed in her studio note:
American physicist Dr Edward Teller (1908 - 2003), 1960. After emigrating to the USA from Hungary, he worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the first atomic weapons. (Photo by Slim Aarons/Getty Images)
“I never have dreams. That I can freely confess.
Once I'm in bed, I sleep deaf and dumb.
But recently, I have dreamt, nevertheless.
It was of the war that will come.
From the trenches, millions of men have crawled,
volunteers all, I was assured by a voice.
They raised their rifles, just as a loud voice called.
Whom they should shoot, that was their choice.
They approach each other staring, without making a sound.
But then came a scream, as of someone in pain.
As if on command, all rifles were turned around.
And by his own hand, each man was slain.
In unending rows, the dreadful slaughter was done.
Really, I never dream.
And I wish I could know who was the one.
The one who did scream.”
Witek’s studio note continues:
“And then he explains: ‘I cannot forget this poem because peace is very much more than the absence of war.’ This whole thing (the poem) seemed to me a very odd conclusion for a man whose life has been to espouse the Bomb and its uses. In a recent New York Times article, 10/18/82, he advocates waging wars from space. Entitling the painting Edward Teller's Dream was a quote from this destruction. His real dreams will kill us just as the soldiers die in his poetry about dreams.”
Witek equated the subject of the painting with “emptiness”:
“the subject… is the emptiness of the vast ‘field’ of vertical four-inch strokes. Here, hopefully, opposites operate and after the vastness is realized, the backup is the tenseness of all those uninterrupted strokes. The painting needed to be ten feet to create that emptiness.”
< Image: detail of Witek’s Edward Teller’s Dream
Emptiness is experienced through the repetitive architecture of Witek’s strokes—what the artist once referred to as “geometrically common destiny”—a bundle of which stack up like a tomb at the bottom center of this painting. And we are right to read the painting this way, as searching for the structure of the composition, Witek studied the architecture of Egyptian funerary tombs.
Edward Teller’s Dream is one of Witek’s most emotionally imbued paintings. As a painter dedicated to monochromatic work, here her use of black now overtly connects with the obvious association with an ominous and foreboding future.
– Jason Andrew, Studio of Joan Witek
Installation view: Joan Witek at Secci / The Armory Show
The following works will also be presented by Secci at The Armory:
