1985.005 001
The visual arts have regularly been considered with regard to their relations: in the heyday of oil painting literature was the next of kin. In contemporary art the closest cousins are philosophy, and her bastard child, theory. But for a few decades in the middle of the last century, when nonobjective painting reigned supreme, the visual arts could be mistaken for music — which meant it was a good time, if there ever is one, for a talented musician who has found his career cut short by throat cancer to turn to the visual arts. In the 1940s, at the age of 35, Don Olsen put down his violin and picked up his paintbrush, and became, with Doug Snow and Lee Deffebach, one of the godparents of abstract art in Utah.
At the end of last year, in time to celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, the UMFA unveiled in the Great Hall a retrospective look at 10 large works by Olsen. The earliest dates to 1957, and the latest to just before the artist’s death in 1983. Despite shifting modes of surface treatment, from juicy expressionist work to hard-edged coolness, the paintings here share a common compositional tension that gives the whole ouevre a personal voice.
Though Olsen’s voice was personal, it was not particularly original. He made frequent trips to New York, developing his abstract vocabulary either by active study with artists like Hans Hofmann, or simply by observation in the many galleries that sprung up in the post-war boom. He returned to his home state a proselytizer if not a pioneer, influencing a generation of painters that came after him.
Olsen may have put down his violin but as these paintings aptly convey, music never left him. His familiar forms and strokes, repeated within a work and from one piece to the next, are like the recurring motifs of a classical composer. His teacher Hofmann called it “push and pull” but Olsen might just as easily have given his visual strategy of combating ground and planes musical terms: piano/forte, counterpoint, consonance and dissonance all come to mind. His paintings sing, whether with brass and strings as in the impasto work from the ’60s, or oboe and bassoon in the weighted, hard-edge work of the ’70s.
Art these days does many things. We read — ad nauseam — how it questions, explores, interrogates and references. Don Olsen: Abstracts from Nature reminds us it can also sing.
The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
