GEORGE DUNBAR
INFINITUM
The earliest work in this exhibition of George Dunbar (1927-2024) was made in 1962, shortly after he returned to New Orleans to take care of his mother, who was terminally ill. By then he was in his mid-thirties and a mature artist in pursuit of his own trajectory. Dunbar’s passion for art was instilled in him at an early age, beginning with his mother taking him along with her to New York, where he was allowed to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art for hours at a time. Later, he studied art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA (1951), and, a year after he graduated, at La Grande Chaumiere in Paris, France.
What the work in this exhibition demonstrates is Dunbar’s life-long engagement with American and European art at crucial moments and, more importantly, how he transformed these encounters into something immediately recognizable as his own. This was because he saw and analyzed the paintings being done by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists with his own eyes, as conveyed by this observation: “I could see that de Kooning continued to draw as he painted—he allowed the sculptural aspects of drawing to become part of his painting." Dunbar took his interest in the “sculptural aspects” of de Kooning’s paintings and turned them into something all his own, the use of an incised line in the clay surfaces he painstakingly applied to his paintings, wall reliefs, and sculptures, a process which already set him apart from de Kooning and others working gesturally. Already well along in this series, “Coin du Lestin LX” (1962), the earliest work in this exhibition, exemplifies one of Dunbar’s lifelong pursuits. The art critic Lily Wei characterized the Coin du Lestinseries as a “wiry, interlaced quatrefoil... emblazoned in the center of the painting like a heraldic device drawn in an Art Deco style, an updated version of an emblem widely used in architecture and illuminated manuscripts during the medieval period.”
I want to build upon Wei’s observation. Dunbar’s quatrefoil, in tandem with his use of gold leaf and other precious metals over a carefully incised clay surface, transforms his work into something that is simultaneously a painting, low-relief, and a self-contained, even portable, architectural detail.
Austere and sensuous, the works in the Coin du Lestin series–one of Dunbar’s grand achievements both for their unexpected beauty and formal rigor–synthesize aspects of hard-edge abstraction, Minimalism, and anticipate the Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as blur the boundaries between painting and architecture. Their geometry bridges the sacred and secular, inspiring the viewer to reflect upon the purpose of art. Is it to contemplate the hidden order of the universe? What about the interplay between the softly glowing, metallic surface and ambient light? What light does Dunbar’s painting wish to transport us to in quiet contemplation?
Alongside the Coin du Lestin series, Dunbar made sculptures and large volumetric collages which incorporated such unlikely things as file folders and dyed linen bundles. One senses in these works a tension between the visceral and optical, a haptic experience and a visual one, which we might regard as the ever-changing relationship between mind and body. Rather than privileging physical form over color and light or vice versa, Dunbar wanted both to exist in a single work.
These works are often figural, which complicates our understanding of Dunbar. He refused to play by the rules and identify exclusively as an abstract or figurative artist. This gave him an immense freedom to explore the evocative power of his incised lines without spelling anything out. It could refer to the veins in the fiddle leaf fig or what Dunbar titled one of his sculptures, “Lyrata (2018), or possibly scars or a battle ravaged breastplate suggested by “Deity XXX 4/5” (2023). Working abstractly and figuratively, he brought architecture and nature into his work. The use of metal leaf turned all of it into something to be revered. Dunbar was essentially a spiritual artist who believed everything was imbued with a holy presence.
Aligned with no religion and absent of all dogma, it is the spiritual component of his work that elevates what we encounter into another domain of experience and self-reflection. Working across a career that spans seventy years, Dunbar chose a path that dealt with issues of spirituality and a heightened state of inward looking. On the surface, what he was pursuing seemed to have little to do with his more materially-minded contemporaries, who were often focused on either the progress or death of painting or art. And yet, there is no trace of nostalgia to be found in Dunbar’s art. He is not looking back or recalling a better time. His use of the grid, geometry, and figural forms, all feel both of their time and outside it. His work was in deep dialogue with the paintings of Frank Stella and Robert Mangold. When we look at his art, we must remember that the quatrefoil or four-leaf-like design is found in Renaissance, Buddhist, and Islamic art and culture; it is the closest thing we have to a universal symbol.
I think it is time we recognize the significance of Dunbar’s engagement with art and with his contemporaries, as it addresses one crisis that art is perpetually undergoing: why is it being made and what should its mission be? By working across mediums, as well as being both geometric and figurative elements, Dunbar challenged orthodoxies regarding art, style, and the need to be consistent and work one way or another. He seems to have taken to heart Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Far from being idiosyncratic or regional in his choices, Dunbar was central in the questions he asked.
JOHN YAU