Hendrik Grise
Modern Agent Provocateur
Hendrik “Harry” Grise (pronounced Gr-ice), was a painter, sculptor, teacher, fashion illustrator and theatrical designer, who was born Johan Hendrik Griese II in Michigan on June 5, 1914. His Parents, Johan Hendrik Griese I and Maria Brugman Griese, were both born in Holland and immigrated to the United States in 1905 and 1910, respectively.
Being the eldest of three siblings of first-generation parents shaped Grise’s early years and would continue to influence him, the rest of his life. The day-to-day struggles, along the road, from “different” to the role model he would become to a generation of art students, taught Grise much about how to succeed in America. His parents adapted well to their new home country, but they were reticent to assimilate fully into American culture and stayed close-knit to the well-established and insularly Dutch communities, that sprung up in and around Michigan. Although Grise embraced his Dutch heritage - it is interesting to note; that, within his immediate family, he was the only one to adopt the common practice of Americanizing ones name - his brother, sister and parents all maintained the typical Dutch spelling (Griese) of their last name. He was known as “Harry” to his family and close friends.
Harry Grise’s early artistic abilities, led him to an art career at the age of 16, painting sets for the Grand Rapids Civic Theater. Later he studied theater arts at the Cleveland Playhouse (America's first professional regional theatre). Determined to dedicate his life to the arts, Grise moved to Chicago, to take up further studies at the Chicago Art Institute and thereafter at the Chicago Professional School of Art. Grise was known to be working in Chicago in the mid to late 30’s as a “freelance artist”.
The artistic culture of Chicago during the 1930’s to the 1940s - when Grise was a direct participant of the Chicago School - was described as “a culture graced with the iconoclastic liberty that life in the modern city afforded.” Many of the artists were immigrants Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Spaniards, and Swedes. In Chicago they found a unique opportunity for artistic expression in a city revitalized through modernism. Yet they didn’t simply depict this revitalization - they helped shape it.” This art-centric melting pot of modernist influence clearly shaped the young, ambitious Grise - who seemed to find his calling in-and-amongst this diverse and cultural urban oasis. This artistic calling would only grow louder to Grise as time went on.
This time period marked the heralding in of the modern, avant-garde art movements (abstraction, non-objective imagery, social realism, populism, labor, urban and rural themes…) that were to become America's greatest contribution to the history of modern art. The abstract expressionist artists making up the dominant “New York School of Art” were to become the focal point in the struggle for world supremacy over the embattled modern art movements that Europe, had previously long dominated. In the end, the New York School artists, along with their supporting cast of dedicated dealers, critics, and museum curators were able to wrestle away from Paris its “mantle” as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's post-war dominance of the international art world.
By 1940 Grise was living in Texas, continuing his artistic pursuits studying at the Dallas Museum School of Art (in the early 1940’s) - while exploring other career opportunities in art and fashion illustration. By the 1940’s, the revolutionary “wave of modernism” had firmly taken hold in Texas, where artists like Grise “absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons of New Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe.” No doubt Grise was continuing to seek new and fertile ground for his growing modernist leanings. An early exhibition that Grise participated in at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas, in 1945 may shed some light onto the technical facility and subject matter that would prevail in Grise’s mature work. One of the works exhibited (titled by him) - “Two Minute Pose (brush drawing)” - both in inferred executional style and chosen medium, demonstrates his early interest in capturing the essence of his subject with unabashed spontaneity and fluidity of line.
Grise was quoted in a later article as saying, “I have no artistic creed or formula. I paint for the love of line, form and color. My painting is a flight into the world of self-expression I draw and paint because I would rather do this than anything else. It is in Grise’s abstract “self-expressions” that one sees the true merit of his genius. His unlabored brush strokes and unwavering “love of line” belie the inimitable hand of the master draftsman he was.
Throughout his career, Grise’s preferred mediums were the more “fluid” ones - like wash, watercolor, gouache, professional poster paint, fluid acrylic and the like. He would often employ a “wet-into-wet” technique in his work - a style of painting that lent itself to the signature, free-flowing, calligraphic symbolism predominant in his oeuvre.
Yearning for greener pastures, Grise’s westward migration would continue on to California, where he found numerous opportunities for his growing success as a fashion illustrator from the likes of Marshall Field and Co., Neiman Marcus and A. Harris in Texas, as well as for Robinson's and Broadway in California. Grise received an LA Times Award in Retail Art, for his exceptional fashion sense (clearly demonstrated in the artistic devices employed in both his figural and lyrical abstract work). In the spring of 1954, Grise won an award for his advertising entry in a nationwide competition that was featured in a related exhibit in Chicago. Grise early success afforded him the luxury of also being able to work out of his well-equipped “studio in in the Los Angeles, Hollywood mansion” he occupied.
When Grise arrived on the Southern California “art scene” in the mid-40’s, he joined a “group of painters” working there that would go on to make the region “an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined the L.A. Look” - one that reflected the actual circumstances of the modern West Coast artistic experience in all its richness. One wonders if Grise was aware of the inadvertent historic parallel he had to the Dutch Revolt of 1566-1568, that set in motion an “unprecedented exodus of artists” from the Southern Netherlands, an artist migration that “reshaped the geo-political and economic makeup” of his parent’s native country. Artist have historically been “first movers” in establishing the flourishing and progressive aspects of regional cultural centers and southern California, where Grise ultimately settled, exemplifies this condition. Although Grise was unable to devote himself entirely to the art he loved (his easel work), he found the community of progressive artists in California too stimulating to leave this time.
The mid-century modern movement, as it relates to urban development and art, was said to span “roughly” from 1933 to 1965. Whether deliberate or not, it is noteworthy to point out that Grise, throughout his life-long artistic career, found himself entrenched in the most relevant regional participants of the modernist art movements in America, during the genesis of said movement. New York, Chicago, Texas, New Mexico, and California are considered amongst the most significant regional contributors to modern art in America. The leader of the pack - The New York School - was synonymous with abstract expressionist painting.
Grise no doubt knew many prominent members of the “New York School” – he personally knew the painter Mark Tobey, who was close to Jackson Pollock. He was friends with Earl Scott, “the quintessential mid-century modern photographer”, and was said to count the likes of Hans Bellmer, the provocative, artist / surrealist photographer, as a de facto "mentor and hero.” The latter artist, Hans Bellmer, coincidently began his artistic career as an illustrator and designer of advertisements for a publishing house. Although the two shared a similar academic foundational element in advertising, it was their mutual “love of line” and interest in exploring the limits of human sexuality that is the most evident thread of influence shared between the two.
A staff writer for the daily report, a period Southern California newspaper, covering a 1977 group exhibition of Grise’s wrote: “In the Grise section, the viewer is immediately struck with color — vivid color. The bold lines soon reveal figures of rotund nude women in the majority of paintings. These are simply called “Models and Students” numbered from I through 8. Some are just “Model” numbered I through 5. Included are “Abstract” numbered I through ll. Simple titles for startling paintings… …There is a tremendous force behind the Grise works... ... even in all the boldness and startling color, there are easy, free flowing lines which appeal to the eye.”
There is a deeper, much more uniquely personal layer of “self-reflexivity” seen in Grise’s work – one much more provocative, intersexual. and at times, deceptively more complex than the mantle “Startling” properly implies. It is in these works that Grise often inserts himself into the narrative of his work, either overtly, or more covertly, blurring the lines of art and self-intersexual expression - in trailblazing fashion. He did this in such a way, that, in today’s “gender-fluid” world, his body of work has much greater relevancy than perhaps he could have even have possibly imagined it would.
Some of Grise’s avant-garde paintings show the “unresolved forms” of conjoined male and female sexual parts, “not two bodies, but a two-fold form” biomorphically and somewhat hermaphroditically blurred into one. Other artists like Allen Jones, an important artist originally at the forefront of British Pop Art who is now internationally known for his cutting edge “erotic and fetish-like explorations of the female figure”, has described his “first explorations of the idea that ‘there are elements of male and female” as being “within everybody’s character.”
The profoundly influential writings of Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) on gender and creativity, both implied that the melding of male and female qualities, that the active and the contemplative, were essential for artistic creativity. “Hermaphroditus” (above, by Grise) can be read as a metaphorical self-portrait of Grise’s own artistic quest. Whether Grise personally studied Jung and Nietzsches’ theories and visually manifested their sexually referenced imagery in his work as “a direct analogy” for the creative act of painting is unknown - but clearly implied by his expansive academic background and perhaps more so by his works’ artistic content.
Today, the term ‘hermaphrodite’ is considered stigmatizing and confusing (and the word intersex is sometimes preferred), but this substitution also carries with it stereotypical challenges. Hermaphrodite finds its origins in early Greek mythology in the story of Hermaphroditus, the handsome son of Aphrodite and Hermes. Hermaphroditus was said to have been so remarkably handsome that he became the object of the water nymph Salmacis’ desire, a desire that grew so deep in her that she supplicated the gods to merge their bodies into one so they would never be parted. The gods, in answer to her prayers merged their two bodies together, transforming them into one androgynous form. The Poet Ovid (born 43 BC) in the writing of his epic poem, “Metamorphosis”, described the fusion of their bodies as being “not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female”.
Grise likely used the private studio in his “mansion” (aside from the life class setting he taught) to paint many of the more “provocative” subjects depicted in his artwork.
Grise’s work contains a wide range of sexual and intersexual symbolism in the form of gender fluidity, hermaphroditic imagery, androgyny, bondage, sexual dismemberment, and other sexually provocative representations. These “startling” works (which almost exclusively depict nude or partially nude subjects) display his tremendous sense of high style, love of line, and lyrical color work that find, universal “appeal to the eye”.
The Phallic hand (holding brush and paint) seen in the work above - Angels and Demons - A Fantasy - is a reoccurring theme in Grise’s art, in the context of the present work it symbolizes a visually powerful “metaphorical” double self-portrait.
Dr. Mark Axelrod, (Professor of Comparative Literature; Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing; and Director of English Graduate Studies, Chapman University), who has done “extensive research” on Grise’s work and “how it relates to postmodern writers and writings of the 20th century” wrote: "One thing that “truly distinguishes Grise's work from his contemporaries (circa 1970s) is that it is replete with self-reflexivity, a notion marked by or making reference to its own artificiality or contrivance, which was seen more in the fiction of the 60s and 70s (and still today) than in painting. The kind of self-reflexivity one might read in the works of writers such as John Fowles or Italo Calvino, John Barth or Donald Barthelme, among others, parallels a lot of what Grise was doing in many of his nudes all of which have no titles; that is, the self-conscious artist whose painting hand takes a prominent place in Nude Reclining with Pen in Hand (my title) or in his pen and ink drawing of himself, peering around what might be an easel and canvas in Grise Spying on his Model (my title). Grise often paints himself into his nudes as the "voyeur" in the guise of the "teacher." This insertion of the artist into the art, thus baring the artificiality of the artwork itself, was a major hallmark of postmodern fiction writers. Whether Grise knew of those writers and of the technique is open to speculation since there is no record of that; however, there is clearly a confluence of imagination that is seen as if all roads led to the same place at the same time” (excerpt taken directly from Hendrik Grise bio written by Dr. Mark Axelrod).
In Grise’s figural work, where he often interjects his unique and varying forms of interactive sexual tension into the creative process, he often minimized himself - when juxtaposed to the stylish models he “captured”. He might have done so as to not upstage the objects of his apparent desire, or, perhaps he felt the need to do so as “some individuals with sexual obsessions” often do in that they “mistakenly consider themselves deviant” and he shared this view of himself. In any event, Grise was willing to lay bare his soul to those patrons who are willing to more closely examine his work, he did so with an openness and truthfulness seldom seen in art, or otherwise.
Sometimes Grise invited other voyeuristic members of the audience into his fantastic world, in almost peep-show fashion, not unlike other “progressive reformers and arbiters of public morals” working from the 30’s onward who made “voyeurism a continuing theme” in their art. For example, the artist Reginald Marsh, who inhabited Coney Island’s amusement parks for their “peep shows, freaks, and cheap thrills,” made this a reoccurring theme in his artwork. Marsh was attracted to this “sea of flesh, the blatant self-display, the blaring signage,” because he, like Grise, could set aside “the moral censor that otherwise ruled” in life” - while partaking in it. As in many of Grise’s works, Marsh’s “lines” were described as conveying “body language more than facial expressions.”
While voyeurism in art is nothing new, the extent to which Grise outwardly demonstrated it in both technique and relative to himself - is artistically unique. His works are all at once provocative and yet conflictingly vulnerable.
Grise was an instructor at the California School of Art in Los Angeles for three years. He was Professor “emeritus” at Chaffey College where, in 1949, Grise began his thirty year-long tenure at Chaffey teaching commercial art and figure drawing. Grise is credited as having “helped develop the Chaffey College art department” over his long tenure at the school.
Starting in the mid 1940’s onward, Grise’s work – according to differing, contemporaneous periodicals - were “widely exhibited [particularly] in the Los Angeles area” and “shown widely in Southern California, notably at the Los Angeles County Fair exhibitions of arts and crafts in Pomona and at Chaffey College Art Gallery in Alta Loma.” Though primary resource materials for such “exhibitions” are tantalizingly elusive, more keep coming to light.
Selected Exhibitions:
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas, 1944
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Texas, 1945
Chicago, Adverting Exhibition (award), Chicago, Ill, 1954
Chaffey Theatre & Library, Alta Loma CA 1967
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona CA; 1974
Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; 1974
Los Angeles county Fair Exhibitions of Arts and Crafts, Pomona, CA; 1974
Museum of History and Art, Ontario CA; 1977
Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; 1977
Los Angeles county Fair Exhibitions of Arts and Crafts, Pomona, CA; 1974
Museum of History and Art, Ontario, CA, 1983 (Feb 6th-26th)
Hendrik Grise
Lyrical Calligrapher
Hendrik Grise personally knew the important, New York School painter, Mark Tobey, who, like Grise, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and had an early career as a fashion illustrator. Grise was familiar with Toby’s signature “white writing,” calligraphic marks that “conveyed energy and light, [which] appear in different media.” Tobey studied Asian calligraphy briefly at a monastery in Japan for a month in 1934, an event which highly influenced Toby’s later work. Grise from the start, much like Tobey, was less interested in the formal concerns of Western artists who were more focused on mass, than he was to his Asian counterparts, who were “more focused on line.” While Grise’s overlay of calligraphic symbols on an abstract field echo Tobey’s work, Grise’s lyrically colored, amplified calligraphic symbols, are stand-alone unique works, having no precedent or sequel to his contemporaries work – they are his own unique distillation of mid-century abstraction as filtered through his personal experiences with the movement.
Grise’s work also relates to the type of "all-over" painting style made famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter from whom Grise drew inspiration. It’s interesting to point out that Pollock was known to attend “all of Tobey's Willard Gallery shows” after which Pollock “went back home and blew them up to 9 by 12 feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on.”
The parallel with Pollock - as to how Grise and Toby’s work relate, is almost too convenient, in that Grise can be said to have gone “back home” to his studio, where he “blew” up Toby’s work, with amplified, calligraphic gestural strokes of lyrical color, applied fluidly to the substrate.
Another unique facet of Grise’s work is that it combined his lyrical calligraphy with geometric, non-objective abstract elements. This imagery is more in harmony with the founding, member artists of the Guggenheim Museum, who advocated “Non-Objective” art just prior to the explosion of the New York School of Art in that same named city. These works by Grise relate in many ways to the work of Kandinsky, Rudolf Bauer, Rolph Scarlett, and other prominent proponents of early non-objective art in America - who were banded together by Solomon Guggenheim and his close art advisor, Hilla Rebay.
Grise’s wet-into-wet backgrounds of free-flowing washes, glazes and application techniques emphasize the spontaneous, emotional nature of his work. These foundational, fluid expressions provide the backdrop for his gestural calligraphic iconography and demonstrate his considerable freedom of technique to manipulate the “variable physical character of paint to evoke a host of expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism).”
Some of Grise’s “all over” works almost completely obfuscate a well-developed composition underpainted in the piece in question. Grise, like many artists working in the abstract expressionist movement was known to “paint over” developed compositions for effect – revealing glimpses of the underpainting in a myriad of glazes, washes and “tonal effects.” Although Grise often preferred to use the more ‘fluid” water-based mediums in his abstract work, he was adept at achieving the types of complex painterly compositions usually only seen in the work of skilled artisans exploiting the more heavily bodied paint mediums - like oil.
Grise’s Abstract works also borrow inspiration from the American modern master, Willem de Kooning who was born in the Netherlands. de Kooning, like Grise began his career in commercial art, “designing window displays and producing fashion advertisements.” Willem de Kooning was “a master technician” of the New York School (and debatebly), considered “second only to Jackson Pollock” in both stature and recognition within the group. Grise liked to sometimes employ de Kooning’s method of depicting “wrestles” forms that were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In these works, Grise’s paintings exemplify “action painting” – in some ways, they resemble de Kooning’s figural abstractions that were said to be “records of a violent encounter.” Grise almost always overlaid his subjects meeting such violent encounters with his signature lyrical calligraphic symbolism. These extrapolative works are the stunning culmination of Grise’s endless imagination and creativity, they can be viewed as the synthesis of the totality of his gifted achievements in art.
Like many of the artists Grise may have drawn inspiration from, Grise was not the exceptional artist he was, because of any one influence, facet of his training, occupation, or otherwise - he was an exceptional artist, first and foremost. Grise, like many other talented artists before him, was drawn to his early artistic calling – not the other way around. Hendrik Grise was born a gifted artist who evolved a unique and complex, signature style of art all his own, playing a key role amongst his contemporaries in the midst of Americas greatest art movement. The very complex, personal nature of Grise’s work - combined with the “scattering of the artist’s estate” (which is now being reassembled) has prolonged Grise’s inevitable curtain-call to widespread recognition. Grise entire body of work is now undergoing serious scholarly art review for the first time since he passed away – helping to illuminate this gifted artist’s talents.
Dr. Mark Axelrod summed it up eloquently, when he concluded his Grise paper this way: “One can easily try to associate a painter with another painter as easily as one may try to associate one writer with another writer, but if one reads Kafka or Beckett or Joyce, one doesn't really need to be told one is reading Kafka or Beckett or Joyce. The distinctions should be readily apparent. Without looking at the signature, whether in pencil or in the stone, one immediately recognizes the work of Chagall or Picasso or Matisse without a guidebook, but there is an unmistakable "signature" to Grise's work as well. There's a movement and a temperament to his work that engages itself immediately and that engagement is pervasive.”
Not too long after his retirement from 30 years of teaching art at Chaffey, Hendrik Grise passed away unexpectedly at the age of 68, on February 27, 1983, in Los Angeles. This was just one day after the conclusion of his, well-received “Three Artists / Three Points of View” group show at the Museum of History and Art in Ontario, CA. It was Grise’s most ambitious exhibition and perhaps a harbinger of even greater artistic endeavors yet to come, had not it been for his early passing. Grise left behind a legacy of visionary works that have universal appeal because of their uniquely personal and expressive style. It has been said that the measure of an artist - their work - “is the true measure of the worth of all creative people." Hendrik Grise is only now just beginning to assume his rightful position amongst the venerable list of art mavericks before him.
Written by Blake Benton
