American Landscape: 1960

American Landscape: 1960. The Undiscovered Artwork.

The American Landscape series created in 1960 originally consisted of five paintings. Two were destroyed when the artist was moving from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village in 1964. The remaining three paintings were rolled and packed in a box, for too many years, while the artist moved from studio to studio. The series was entered in 1962 in the pre de Rome competition in the category of fine arts, where the committee decided that if the artist removed the expletive ” fuck you” in the painting, Fiesta: Brooklyn, he would be accepted for the covered pre de Rome fellowship to work and study in Rome, Italy. Dewey elected to leave the expletive on the painting and refused to alter the work. This painting Fiesta was one of the first American artistic works to visually incorporate literary graphic writing to enhance the visual statement and the words, “Dukes, Joe the spick, Post No Bills and fuck you”,  was in fact part of the actual wall used for the painting. Because of his decision the artist was not awarded the pre de Rome fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.

In 1968 the painting Fiesta was again entered in competition. The Phoenix Museum in Arizona awarded the painting Second Place in their statewide annual competition in fine arts. On opening night when the award winners were exhibited, the painting Fiesta, listed in the program was not hung; it was stored in a closet. The Phoenix Museum stated that although the painting received the highest award in its category it would not be part on the exhibit because of the expletive “fuck you” in the painting. The Museum had not informed Dewey of this decision until he arrived at the ceremony; he removed the painting from the closet and returned it to its proper place: rolled up in a box in his studio. The term “graffiti” taken from graffiare: to scratch, from grafio: stylus. “An inscription or drawing made on some public surface (as a rock or wall): also: a message or slogan written as a graffito” had not been coined in America until 1966 and ironically in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1968, in Phoenix Arizona, even to the most enlightened groups of artistic dilettantes,  “graffiti”, wasn’t even a word or a thought.

In 1972 after the publication of the book entitled onyamarks: a collection of thoughts and drawings: a work that was a direct derivative of American Landscape 1960,  the artist elected to abandon writing and the fine arts for the illustration profession. The obvious loss was the poetry. That ingredient in artistic expression that is visionary and embraces the human condition and the contrasts of life: its beauty and sorrow. Stability and creativity cannot mix as they are antithetical in the spectrum of artistic expression. This new direction as an Illustrator was for Dewey stability: the path of least resistance. Hence now in 2003, the undiscovered artwork and the lost book: are resurrected.  The remaining three paintings that are American Landscape: 1960 depict a time in American History when the sounds of an ideological collision began to echo through the streets and cities of a society that had not perceived the impending confrontation.

The publication onyamarks 1972: the Lost Book by Kenneth Francis Dewey may be viewed at www.truefire.con (search Dewey)

 

 

 

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