- [Announcer] This broadcast of "Joseph Fiore: The Nature of the Artist" is brought to you by Maine Farmland Trust, protecting farmland and revitalizing Maine's rural landscape with support from the Fiore family and with the support of the Maine Art Gallery, celebrating Joseph Fiore's 100th birthday with the exhibit "Fiore at 100: Maine Observed."

June 19th through August 24th in Wiscasset, Maine.

(light classical music) - Seeing everything in perspective from back when I first studied with and became interested and influenced by his work.

I mean, it's interesting.

At that time, the New York School was just becoming the New York School.

So when Joe was involved with all of those painters, it was before the fame spread all over New York and all over the world.

(light classical music) - Oh, here's one from '64, "Ledges and Streams."

This could have been the one that was at the Maine Coast Artist easily.

It might have been that painting.

Well, I was shocked by it.

I don't know that I was attracted to it at first.

I was sort of astonished by it, and it seemed so out of place in contemporary art.

I thought it must be somebody who'd lived in great seclusion and painted these very naive and simplistic paintings.

I did not know that Joe had actually been to Black Mountain, which is the most sophisticated art school of its era.

(bright music) And I was entirely familiar with everything that was going on and was doing something quite deliberate and quite self-aware.

- He viewed Black Mountain, he just said in one interview I was a sponge.

And so he just sucked up all kinds of influences.

(bright music) - A lot of what was taught at Black Mountain was really modernism, was abstraction.

Whether it was more geometric from Albers or more gestural from somebody like Willem deKooning, but somebody like Fiore, he really started, I think, with a modern training there and then really took to it and found that it was something that he wanted to develop in his professional life.

And that's what happened.

(bright music) - Artists were very interested in finding a new universal framework that would draw in all cultures.

They were really attracted to the primitive.

So Olson visited Mayan Glyphs gave a lecture, and Joe did the posters or the visuals for that.

But the thing is that the wider artistic community, poets, visual artists was just part of the language of the times.

- [Vincent] He developed into a teacher and actually the leader of the art department.

- Joe was right on for that.

He read an article, I think from 1940s, I suppose, about Black Mountain.

He knew he wanted to go there.

He went there and he stayed there.

Black Mountain, the outhouse of the Bauhaus, it was at once, a kind of a dig on being stuck in the sticks with hillbillies and outhouse.

And similarly, everybody else was praising the beauty of the landscape at Black Mountain and Bolotowsky called it Green Indigestion.

- Okay, that's when I first met Joe at Black Mountain, and he gave me that, and I was thrilled of course.

We were both students, and then Joe became a teacher there in the fall of '49, there was kind of a split.

That's when Albers and his wife left and there were younger students there, and they just were quickly given jobs.

- The College, Black Mountain College was attracting a lot of people who were really like stray dogs.

We were, I think of us as stray dogs.

There were lots of problems and so forth, and Joe was like, quote, "normal" unquote.

At Black Mountain, both he and Mary were like the big sister and big brother.

Like they were really something very, very solid.

They would take us, you know, the Asheville movies, Pile into Joe and Mary's car, the Roxy and Swan and Noah.

- It was very small, and we ate together, and the students and faculty all knew each other.

Don't get me on Black Mountain because I loved it there.

People were passionate about what they did there.

- I think Joe Fiore was influenced at Black Mountain by the work of DeKooning and by Bolotowsky's teachings and also by Vicente's work, Esteban Vicente.

- Mary was always grumbling that, oh, well, you know, they're always talking about the stars at Black Mountain.

And Joe was often left out.

He wasn't razzle dazzle.

- As I've been photographing some of his early abstract work from the '50s, to focus on the detail, it highlights the small fragments.

There are not a lot of paintings that have that kind of high, brilliant, snappy contrast.

(bright music) - Joe's genius was, it was apparent in the work, if you had eyes in your head to see.

He was not a self-promoter.

There was none of that.

He was really very serious, I mean, he was a serious artist.

The art was what was important, not, you know, all the other stuff.

I remember the bright lyrical beauty of his very abstract paintings at that particular time and being very impressed with and beginning to get it.

(bright music) - And when we moved to New York, Joe's old high school buddy Dan Covano had stayed friends with a woman who lived across the hall where they both lived on East 6th Street.

So Ann Arnold was living with Alex Katz for a little while, and Dan was having supper there and said, oh, my old friend Joe Fiore just moved to New York you know, in the neighborhood, should we go see him?

So they came over and we became friends with Alex.

- Well, he came to New York and he was on 29th Street, and I was on 28th Street.

It had to be middle late '50s, I think '56, '57.

And I was carrying a paint box over to the river.

And, you know, he seemed intrigued by that.

I was doing plain air painting on the Hudson River, and it was mostly a matter of technical experiments for me, you know, and he was intrigued by that idea, you know?

And then we became friends and I think he started to paint those realistic paintings a little after that.

(bright music) At "The Cocktail Party," I wanted to use gestures of our time, which was like smoking and drinking.

So I got a whole bunch of friends together in a loft.

I was at the Flatiron Building on 5th Avenue, and they drank and smoked and I drew and finally got everyone to pose and put it together and made a composition.

That was the thing, and Joe's talking to Yvonne Jacquette.

- He had his students paint outside quite a bit.

That was sort of in the era.

That wasn't just Joe Landscape was in, you know, a lot of artists were doing that then.

So he'd get whatever students could fit in the car and they'd drive to Fairmont Park in Philadelphia.

- The year that I studied with Joe, we were painting the Lemon Hill mansion in back of the Philadelphia Museum, this great fall day, and walked up behind me and said basically, too many notes, too many leaves, too much information.

I needed to simplify it more so that the few, essentially the few worked for the many, he certainly helped us with making the right choices and distilling things down to the right painting components.

From time to time, I would have a car, and because of Joe's musical background, we would listen to the Philadelphia classical music station, WFLN.

So we were doing things like that kind of classical name that tune.

But we were astounded by his knowledge of music.

And I didn't know until later on as I got to know him, that his father was a founding member of the Cleveland Orchestra, and his uncles have played with the orchestra, and that's the household that he grew up into.

If he had a brush in one hand, music was in the other hand, they worked really hand-in-hand.

- Joe had a background of his father, was his father, a violinist in a Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, and he wanted Joe to study the violin.

And Joe, on the third lesson, Joe burst into tears and said, no, he's not going to do it.

And just as well, that wasn't his path.

- I knew Joe from 10th Street.

He was with the group that remained together for a long time.

A group that eventually came to Maine.

- There were a group of painters that would go to Long Island, and there were the group of painters that went to Provincetown, and then there were the painters that came to Maine.

- Maine seemed to fit.

It had a real low cost of living up here, you know, I mean, you can buy a place, a big place, or you know, a place with land and something like that for very little money at that time.

And it was kind of a nice life and a pretty place.

- Nobody had wheels except me.

I had a 1938 Buick, a big touring Buick.

- [Alex] Charlie DuBack came up early and Lois Dodd.

So there were a bunch of us and Joe came about the same time.

- We didn't have any plan of having a summer home, but we'd heard these other people talk about it and everything.

So Joe rented it from Mrs. Nash.

I just talked to her daughter the other day, and you know, he didn't really, he sort of looked in the window and thought, well, yeah, I'll rent this house.

And it was $150 and had no plumbing.

And we didn't realize it didn't have electricity.

There were no babysitters, there was no restaurant down there.

Of course there was no bar, there was no movie.

You made your own amusement.

And it's kind of interesting because Joe grew up in the city.

He was a city boy, and he loved it here.

When he first saw the place, he liked the space out there.

And you know, he was, I mean, he was an artist after all.

- I had so much more awareness of nature and than my friends did in the city, you know, just, you know, being up here every summer.

And then, you know, and then my father got into birdwatching, so.

- Every year we went to the Salt Bay Chamberfest, which still exists in Damariscotta.

And they asked them to do a cover.

And so Joe did the cover, which they used on their programs.

You know, we'd get very excited about the rainbows.

And you probably remember when you were older, there were more rainbows in the old days.

- We watched the Northern Lights actually from Joe's house, I remember I went my girlfriend for dinner one night, and as it got quite late, there was quite a display of Northern Lights right out of there where they ate, where they had their dining room table.

- You should show him the paintings in your bedroom.

Those are nice.

- Yeah, good paintings in the bedroom.

The first painting Joe did out at Artists for Environment, so I suppose it was early spring.

- I remember going on with him to the Delaware Water Gap.

That was because it had big forms and it was nature in the raw.

(bright music) At that time he was painting very realistically.

And so was I.

(bright music) - The paintings that I saw in Maine Coast Artists, I remember one of them was of water trickling down over rocks in a little stream.

It was extremely, you'd say laconic if it were writing, you know, that it was like a man of few words, you know, will say something very briefly and without emphasis or exaggeration at all.

- You know if you just met Joe and had no idea of where he'd been or what he'd been doing, he was such a quiet man that you could think anything you wanted to think, really.

He's not trying to impress you with his bravado, and he is not trying to appeal to your sense of coziness or prettiness or any of that stuff.

- It doesn't look like a cubist, it doesn't got the paint in your face.

It's just absolutely flat.

And it's really quite, I think they're quite unique, you know, they just didn't relate to conventional modern methods of painting.

- Impressionism is a touch style.

It's made out of little blobs, little tiny touches.

The Fairfield's painting coming more out of deKooning, the way deKooning moved the paint around.

It's more like a pushed situation.

So you get a long line, so to speak, or it has a direction.

Joe, I would say doesn't exactly belong in either of those categories.

His touch is very neutral.

In other words, it doesn't have the urge that the impressionists had, which was to fragment pieces of color to make them more vivid and make the surface more lively.

But he puts it on quite evenly.

He moves the paint without making elaborate glazes or elaborate systems like you would, if you'd gone to the National Academy in New York to school, you wouldn't paint like this either.

It is direct painting, by which I mean it comes straight out of the manipulation of paint directly down onto the canvas.

It doesn't have under layers.

First you paint the whole painting gray and then you pick out the whites and so on.

It doesn't have any of that systematized feeling to it at all.

It does have freshness of vision.

It's because the approach to the paint is fresh.

- Well, this stuff was basically, I say out of fashion.

'Cause it was like this, if you painted abstract expressionist in 1953, something like that, and younger one, you had no place to show, no galleries wanted it.

And then by 1955 or six, that's what the galleries wanted.

So if you painted another style, it was out.

- I was an abstract painter at the time and was beginning to work from observation, just beginning to very crudely.

I think it had to do with my own work getting more and more interested in observation and the almost sort of neutral attitude to making the observations, making paint into observation on the canvas surface.

That made me see how good Joe was.

"Sun Breaking on the Meadow," That flash of light in those dark clouds, it's as dramatic as Joe's painting gets, which is anti-dramatic on the whole.

It's anti-histrionic, anti-dramatic, anti-theatrical.

- So it doesn't matter to live in nature.

It doesn't matter.

You just go, we're painters.

So you go and there it is, there it is.

And you do it.

Joe's beginnings, I shouldn't say beginnings, but as a landscape painter, Joe was very plain.

That was one of the things that was made him very attractive.

- Rackstraw Downs described it as kind of without style.

- Okay, but I want to say this, that he always had the most beautiful sense of proportion.

I remember that big landscape with the clouds, that famous one.

Those clouds are grand.

- That's the one.

- Those are not without style.

Now, Rackstraw probably wanted it to be without, so he had a whole theory about that.

And it's true, Joe was playing, but he had this grand, this sense of proportion.

- It had a kinda moderate feeling to it, extremely moderate feeling to it, which I found just absolutely beautiful and very intriguing.

And I think that it opened up for me in my own painting, a sense of there are other possibilities yet, you know.

- Look, art is, you know, beautiful artist, beautiful art.

Constable sometimes can be plain and Turner can be schmaltzy, but it doesn't mean the picture's better.

Sometimes the schmaltzy Turner is better than a plain Constable sometimes.

I mean there's a great love of Morandi who's plain, but that's a mad love of the 20th century.

They were wacky, all of a sudden, that's all they loved.

There was no style.

Ridiculous.

Matisse is full of style.

Is Morandi a greater painted than Matisse?

I mean, it's, you know, it doesn't matter.

- I remember once he was at my loft after an opening of one of my shows, and there was a dancing party going on, and I turned up the volume of the sound, you know, so these dancers could hear it.

And Joe sort of reacted with this horror, a sense of horror that this was much too loud, you know?

And that was somehow, that's in his painting, that you don't get over excited about things.

You make them very calmly.

(bright music) - The middle period, the empirical landscapes, empirical means, just based on personal observation, were the most conventional of his group of pictures.

But at the same time, he was one of the persons that was kind of fighting for the right to be representative in a period when a lot of people were saying painting was dead.

- I told Alex one day, I said, I'm trying to match colors.

And he said, oh yeah, I remember when Joe Fiore started trying to do that.

That was really tough for Joe, you know, to do that.

And there was something very fresh and very shocking about the idea of doing what Joe did.

The whole range of tonalities and so on that he worked in is very precise.

You know, it's quite narrow.

He doesn't use pure opaque black or anything.

It's always, even his oils have the quality rather of watercolors of being very gentle and subtle in the way that they're executed.

And the color is not in a strong range, a wide range.

- To be a colorist is not to set people's teeth on edge when you use color, if somehow everyone responds with surprise and joy or pleasure, then you're a colorist.

Otherwise you're not.

Joe was definitely a colorist, yeah.

- There was one summer when he just stopped doing landscape, and that was really shocking.

I don't know if I was, maybe I wasn't living at home.

That would've been in the '70s sometime.

- Yeah.

- And you know, and I came to visit and all of a sudden there were these, well, there's some of these paintings on woods, like that one up there.

- Yeah.

Well that's when we had work done on the house, there were scraps of wood left, and he made all these paintings on wood, yeah.

- So that summer he did no landscape, and he only did these very kind of playful, you know, things on boards and stuff.

And you know, what's going on?

- Just when someone, you know, changes their approach, you're an abstractionist.

You're not looking at anything supposedly.

And then you're out there really in front of it, outside looking at something.

And then later on when he went back to working abstractly again, taking his suggestion from the rocks or things that he picked up, you know, I mean, he had a big collection of rocks in that barn out there, and you or I looking at them wouldn't have, it wouldn't have happened that way.

You know, it's very interesting what happened with him and the rocks.

(bright music) - It is all the little markings and it's mostly small rocks that he picked up.

And then in the painting, they'd expand the skip.

- That one particular rock.

- [Mary] Those rocks are still in the barn.

(bright music) - In the later work, the abstract rock fragment things, they coalesced around several of his interests.

They coalesced around cubism.

It also coalesced around the interest in these ancient cultures.

And it coalesced around a sort of visual verbal suggestions so that you had things that were very visual, but they also were about writing.

Even if you couldn't decipher them.

- [Alex] They were like cave paintings in a way.

They were like delicate cave paintings, if you can imagine such a thing.

- [Artist] It's very archeological.

Yeah.

Evolving out of his rock period where he was literally painting the surfaces and archeological characteristics, fossil characteristics, so that those rocks eventually evolving into abstract paintings using those motifs.

- In the archives found after his death were everything from alchemical symbols to just notebooks full of petroglyphic kind of marked.

(bright music) - It was interesting to see him having gone and, you know, started out in abstraction and then gone so deeply into representational painting, then coming back to something, but in a totally different way, and not really, I wouldn't even call it going back to his roots exactly.

- I think it might have something to do with the fact when you're out there painting nature, you become aware at a point that your color is kind of subdued.

It's always subdued.

No matter what you do, it's subdued.

There's isn't too much, you know, straight blatant color out there.

So looking at Joe's work, it looked like he was craving more color, more color strength.

So going back to finding some way to do that, and maybe working from the rocks and then thinking more abstractly, he was able to make that move back to stronger color and move it along that way.

- I think the first thing that you notice, whether it's an artist or a good student, is that some people have an ability to deal with intense color, and with a wide range of color and not lose control of the picture.

Using bright, modern combinations that hold together and sing a song.

- The color studies were done in pastel and watercolor on paper.

Some of them were studies, optical studies of color, relationships that he was working out particular harmonies of color.

They're not just informational.

They all have a kind of a soul and heart to them that is very exciting to look at.

His mind and eye were completely engaged in everything that had to do with color.

(light classical music) (barn door grinding) (light classical music) - [Neighbor] Joe was a marvelous neighbor.

I mean, you'd hear him playing Bach he had on the piano, and that's a wonderful thing.

(light classical music begins) (light classical music ends) (bright music begins) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music ends) - [Announcer] This broadcast of "Joseph Fiore: The Nature of the Artist" was brought to you by Maine Farmland Trust, protecting farmland and revitalizing Maine's rural landscape with support from the Fiore family and with the support of the Maine Art Gallery, celebrating Joseph Fiore's 100th birthday with the exhibit, "Fiore at 100: Maine Observed."

June 19th through August 24th in Wiscasset, Maine.

(light classical music)