These Days, John Baldessari Cribs From the Masters

Photo

LOS ANGELES — Having taught many generations of Los Angeles artists, John Baldessari proudly displays a few of their creations on the walls of his large studio in Venice. One piece, by Analia Saban, consists of white paper cleverly made to look like a stained gym towel.

Its wry humor is in the Baldessari vein. But fans of this famously off-kilter, boundary-pushing conceptual artist might be more surprised to find hanging above his desk a perfectly balanced still life by a more traditional painter: a serene little image in muted browns and grays by the 20th-century Italian master Giorgio Morandi, showing a fluted vase flanked by jars and boxes.

“It’s the first painting I ever bought,” said Mr. Baldessari, seated at his desk behind a mess of books and papers, wearing rumpled black clothes that highlight the whiteness of his beard. He said he bought it last fall from the David Zwirner Gallery for what he called “an embarrassing amount of money.”

“I find it so beautiful, and I’m always learning things from it,” he added, pointing to two parallel black lines in the puzzle-like composition.

Photo

In the 1980s and ’90s, when he was associated with Pictures Generation artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, Mr. Baldessari specialized in his own puzzle-like photo-based work, which often incorporated fragments from black-and-white film stills (westerns and old romances, most notably). He typically painted over faces, or placed round stickers on them, undercutting Hollywood-style glamour and heroism while leaving his own colorful mark. Later he incorporated snippets of film dialogue, too — enigmatic bits that asked the viewer to fill in large gaps in meaning.

Now 84, Mr. Baldessari has been turning away from film sources and grappling more directly with the history of painting. He is paying tribute to old and modern masters by borrowing details of their works in ways that make his creative ancestors seem especially current. For Mr. Baldessari, who early on hired sign painters instead of picking up the brush himself, this focus on traditional painting seems especially remarkable.

For a series at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, he borrowed a half-peeled lemon from a 17th-century still life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem and the bare legs of Venus from a 16th-century painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The satire is more direct than ever: He paired each image with film dialogue that touches on art or money, or art as money — targeting the collector-speculators who see only the financial value of art.

His new work in the studio, heading to Marian Goodman in the fall, gives Giotto’s Annunciation and Crucifixion scenes from the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, a colorful makeover.

“I do believe that art comes from art,” Mr. Baldessari said, toying with a plastic pickle on his desk that yodels, a gift from Damien Hirst. “I think about old art a lot. Giotto is one artist I think about a lot. Goya is another.” He has named dogs after each of them.

“I was going to be an art historian once,” he said. “That was early on, in the early ’70s, when I thought being an artist wasn’t very dignified. I thought being an art historian, I could be called Dr. Baldessari, and that would be better.”

He recalled his visit many years ago to the Giotto frescoes in the Arena Chapel, which rank among the masterpieces of Western art. He was struck by “the simplicity of his forms — they are so strong and solid.” He added: “His sensibility looks so modern to me. No elaboration, no ornamentation, very direct.”

Some of those scenes shape Mr. Baldessari’s new series, “Complementary Colors,” a dozen canvases inkjet-printed with a pared-down or fragmented image in bright yellow or dark purple. Names of different hues run along the bottom edges of the paintings. Images and words are at odds — a classic Baldessari technique for prompting viewers to question their own assumptions about the trustworthiness of the visual world, the written word or both.

The yellow canvases display images of everyday objects, like a lampshade or a cactus. The purple canvases feature Giotto’s biblical scenes, with Mr. Baldessari painting over an angel here and there but still reinforcing the power of Giotto’s forms.

Photo

The artist Meg Cranston called this acknowledgment of the old masters a growing emphasis for Mr. Baldessari, who was her teacher at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1980s. (He retired from teaching a decade ago.) “I think he’s at the point in his career where he can show his gratitude, his appreciation of other artists” in ways that a younger artist might be tempted to bury, she said. “This generosity of spirit is one of the privileges of success.”

The curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who co-edited, with Ms. Cranston, “More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari,” two volumes of the artist’s writings, dates the shift to the completion of his retrospective “Pure Beauty,” which started at the Tate Modern in 2009 and ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011.

“This sort of retrospective is a lot of work and very time-consuming,” Mr. Obrist said. “Once it passed, it led to an eruption of creativity.”

Almost every Saturday Mr. Baldessari makes the rounds at Los Angeles galleries with his old friend, the painter-critic Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe. On Sundays, he likes to watch movies with his son, Tony: “Even bad movies are good movies to me.”

Other days he reports to the studio, where studies for the paintings now on view through April 9 at the new Los Angeles outpost of the Sprüth Magers gallery are pinned to the walls.

For these paintings, which were finished last summer, he combined lines from film scripts — with mentions of physical work like scrubbing pots and pans — with pictures of leisure activities: a man relaxing in a hammock, a woman in a lounge chair, or a close-up on a body receiving a massage. It has the makings of a critique of the American leisure class that profits from the labors of an underclass.

The gallery’s co-owner, Philomene Magers, said that the series reflects “John’s patient approach toward undermining the clichés of everyday West Coast life.”

But Mr. Baldessari called the series the last of its kind: “I will not be doing any more work with film scripts,” he said. “I get bored, so I like to keep moving.”

Boredom just might be the guiding principle of his career. This is, after all, the artist who in 1970 gave his students at CalArts an assignment sheet that included the (optional) homework of writing out the sentence “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” 1,000 times on the wall. He then turned the idea into prints and a video — a move that suggests that thinking critically about art is itself a form of art.

Now Mr. Baldessari is interested in taking a closer look at another influential artist-teacher: “I think the next work that I’ll make will deal with Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock,” he said. “Benton was Pollock’s teacher, and that fascinates me.”

He continued: “If you look at reproductions of Thomas Hart Benton paintings, which are landscapes usually, they’re very loopy and swirly. You can see where Pollock got his ideas.”