Meet postwar California art expert, distinguished “Newsweek”
art critic and prolific abstract painter Peter Plagens. Did we mention he’s
a Trojan?
Courtesy of the Summer 2005 Trojan Family
by Nick P. Divito
Photos by
S. Peter Lopez
Peter Plagens ’62 shuffles
stocking-footed across the glossy,
hardwood floor of his immaculate Tribeca
loft in search of the political cartoons
he sketched for the Daily Trojan
some 45 years ago. Maybe they’re near
the neatly preserved artifacts from his
16 years as Newsweek’s in-house
art critic. Perhaps they’re in the
orderly bookshelves laden with art
history books, some with his name on
their spines, or the clearly labeled
boxes of widgets and whatnots, or next
to the fastidiously organized drawers of
his startlingly uncluttered desk.
“It might be mild OCD,” Plagens
reflects, pausing mid-search. “I have a
little thing with neatness.” (Guests who
enter his spacious loft are instructed
to remove their shoes. For the sockless,
spares are on hand.)
There’s no denying it: Plagens (rhymes
with “pagans”) is a neatnik. That fact
might seem trivial until you consider
his extensive body of abstract paintings
– self-described as “loose and open,
very chancy and sloppy.”
“It’s really interesting when you think
about it,” muses Sique Spence, a
longtime friend, neighbor and director
of Lower Manhattan’s tony Nancy Hoffman
Gallery, where Plagens’ paintings have
been hung and sold during the past 30
years. “Nicholas Wilder’s paintings were
absolutely meticulous, almost ‘fetish
finish,’” she continues, “and his place
was an absolute pigsty. In contrast,
Peter’s work is very loose – lots of
scribbling and dripping – and that seems
to be something in contrast with
obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Maybe
his art helps him to get into that
place?”
Ask the 64-year-old painter-art critic,
and he shrugs: “That’s one of those deep
interpretations that’s not for any
artist to make about himself. You’d have
to ask my shrink, [except] I don’t have
one.”
Plagens studiously avoids pondering the
so-called “deep, hidden meaning” in his
art. “To me, the paintings are, at
bottom, all about an existentialist view
of the world,” he has written. Yet there
is no “thinly disguised symbolism
lurking in their abstractness (at least
not as far as I can help it). Even if
there were, the last thing I’d want to
do is inflict upon the viewer a long
exegesis about them. In short, the
existentialism is my problem.”
Which leaves all the more elbow room for
viewers to seek their own meanings.
Trojans were given a rare opportunity to
do just that last winter, when the USC
Fisher Gallery presented Peter
Plagens: An Introspective. It was
the first time the museum, now in its
66th year, has held a solo show
dedicated to the art work of an alumnus.
This isn’t really surprising when you
consider, as USC School of Fine Arts
dean Ruth Weisberg puts it, that
“Plagens is easily one of the art
school’s most famous, well-known and
successful alumni.”
Fisher Gallery director Selma Holo has
been acquainted with his paintings for
years. Back in 1981, several Plagens
canvases were part of a group show at
the Fisher called Quiet Commitment.
Untitled (VIII), 2003, mixed media on paper.
Last year, looking about for an exhibition to mount that would be
appropriate for marking the university’s 125th anniversary, Holo had an
inspired thought. “It occurred to me,” she writes in the show’s glossy
catalogue, “that Peter Plagens was both an artist and a public figure,
an alumnus who might most suitably present the university at a moment of
celebration and, yes, of introspection.”
Holo found herself jetting between Southern California and New York to
view the “zillions” of pieces the artist had produced. When Holo won
grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Peter Norton Family
Foundation to fund the exhibition, it seemed to confirm her curatorial
acumen: “Peter is not just someone who graduated from USC,” she says.
“He’s an important American artist, and his art deserves to be
showcased.
The local art scene certainly seemed to approve her choice. In his
review for the Los Angeles Times, critic David Pagel praised the Fisher
show for “consistently (serving) up quiet excitement that’s easy to miss
because it’s simultaneously sophisticated and inelegant.” He had kind
words for the painter, too. “To find another abstract artist whose work
combines the intellectual savvy and disdain for snobbery that Plagens
does, you’d have to go back to Willem de Kooning… But the more telling
comparison is to Mark Twain: another multi-talented multi-tasker whose
whip-smart insights go hand-in-glove with the conviction that accessible
experiences beat academic theorization any day and that popularity, for
its own sake, means nothing.”
A professional hyphenate if there ever was one, Plagens boasts a litany
of impressive resumé-points: Aside from being a reigning authority on
California postwar art, Newsweek magazine’s resident art critic for the
last 16 years and a respected abstract painter whose work has toured in
America and abroad, Plagens has authored several books of criticism and
a novel, won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, held down
multiple professorships and helped raise three kids. Now, after 40 years
in the art biz, he finds himself at the top of his game: The exhibition
at USC Fisher Gallery, which features 44 pieces spanning 30 years of
art-making, is the most wall space ever devoted to his paintings.
And he’s not slowing down. “What’s wonderful about Peter,” observes Holo,
“is he keeps on discovering things that he wants to say.” Plagens
deflects such compliments.
“Of all the national art critics,” he quips, “I’m the best known as a
painter. Of all the painters, I’m the best known as an art critic. But,”
he adds ruefully, “it’s better than being a disgrace.”
Born March 1, 1941, in Dayton, Ohio, Plagens was a self-proclaimed runty
late-bloomer. As a tot he had an early and admittedly peculiar
fascination that might, to someone acquainted with the work of Marcel
Duchamp, have presaged a future in art. “I loved toilets,” he confesses,
between sips of non-alcoholic beer while lounging in his studio.
When the Plagens family drove cross-country to Southern California in
1942, it seems young Peter made a study of the flushing action of all
the gas station restrooms along the way, earning him a pet-name: The
Toilet Inspector. He apparently achieved toddler-nirvana when the family
reached San Francisco’s Pulgas Water Temple, a Beaux Arts-style monument
marking the terminus of the Bay Area’s massive water transmission
system. “Whoosh!” Plagens gleefully mimics his memory of the roar of
rushing waters. “I remember I thought it was great. It struck me as all
those other toilets, writ large.”
His father was a commercial artist who bounced from small firm to small
firm, all the while dreaming of writing a science fiction novel or
making a TV series about jazz musicians.
“I often refer to him as the Willy Loman of commercial art,” Plagens
says. “My father loved me, treated me very well, and gave me my interest
in art and a sense of obligation to read as much as I could. On the
other hand, he was a moderate failure in the business world. I think at
least part of that was due to his religion.”
A devout Christian Scientist, George Plagens would, in his son’s words,
retreat “into the bedroom to ponder the key to the scriptures instead of
swimming with the sharks. To him, the whole material world was a figment
of God’s imagination.”
The younger Plagens firmly set his sights on living in the here and now.
“I’m more ambitious than he was,” he says of his father. “And I’m an
atheist who thinks organized religion scores about 80 on a scale of 100
in therapeutic value, but near zero in truth value.”
Religion, however, remained a central theme in Plagens’ life through
adolescence. When the family settled in the newly developed suburb of
Alondra Park, Calif., his father organized the residents to form the
Alondra Park Community Methodist Church – Methodist being the
denomination of the neighborhood’s only available ordained minister.
“I had perfect attendance at Sunday School, from kindergarten through
fifth grade,” says Plagens, with some irony. “Of course, it had a lot to
do with the fact that my mother taught Sunday school.”
When Plagens was 13, his family started attending the more progressive
First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, where “the sermons were more
about the evils of Joe McCarthy than they were about anything having to
do with Jesus.”
His mother, whom Plagens describes as a “get-things-done, salt of the
earth” type, lost interest in churchgoing; the budding artist embraced
atheism, and thereafter his father practiced Christian Science alone.
Despite his religious rebellion, Plagens was hardly the stereotypical
’60s counterculture rebel. At John Marshall High School in L.A.’s Silver
Lake district, he ran with the “square” crowd – studiously doing his
schoolwork, drawing in his spare time, steering clear of drugs. “I knew
I didn’t want to be a radical, dope-smoking, smack-shooting lefty
artist,” Plagens says. “I wanted to be a successful painter, featured in
a gallery in the big city.”
But while similarly ambitious classmates talked of going to Cal or
Stanford, Plagens looked no farther than USC. With the aid of a little
nest-egg his mother had put by and a couple of scholarships, Plagens
entered the university majoring first in English, then switching to fine
art.
“It sounds kiss-assy, but I got a wonderful education at USC,” he says.
“I studied real, real hard.” Living at home and working odd jobs to make
ends meet, Plagens says he “painted for grades.” Yet he was determined
not be a detached commuter and campus outsider.
So when two tipsy upperclassmen urged him to rush Alpha Tau Omega,
Plagens eagerly embraced Greek life. Ordered by his fraternity brothers
to participate in campus affairs, the young artist marched up the steps
of the Student Union, handed the editor of the Daily Trojan a stack of
drawings and promptly became the newspaper’s editorial cartoonist for
the rest of his college years.
“I thought maybe I could be Herb Block or Bill Mauldin or someone like
that,” Plagens chuckles. In time, the charms of fraternity life faded –
it was expensive, Plagens says. “I didn’t have two nickels to rub
together.” But the cartooning job stuck. “I loved the DT,” he says. “I
so desperately wanted to be one of those ‘DT dorks.’ The parties were
better, and the people were smarter. They were just more interesting
than the Row was. I wanted to be sophisticated. I wanted to have a tweed
jacket and a tie on, a Marlboro in my hand, and to order a scotch mist
at Julie’s.”
Plagens loved not just the student-reporters’ frumpy style but their
edgy nonconformity. During his senior year, Plagens recalls the Daily
Trojan ran an exposé on two underground student parties then dominating
campus politics. “The players in that game went on to become some of the
key players in Watergate,” notes former Daily Trojan editor Barbara
Saltzman ’61.
The exposé needed a powerful illustration; Plagens obliged with a series
of quaint John Tenniel-style illustrations showing Alice in Wonderland
falling through a rabbit hole and discovering strange underground
shenanigans. “I thought they were pretty damn good,” Plagens says of the
cartoons.
“Pete’s illustrations were brilliant,” agrees Saltzman, who went on to
be an editor with the Los Angeles Times. “He would have had a brilliant
career as a political cartoonist,” she opines, had he not opted for
brilliant careers as an artist and art critic.
Echoes her husband, Joe Saltzman, the paper’s 1961 editor-in-chief and
now a journalism professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication,
Plagens “made the Daily Trojan one of the great college newspapers in
the early 1960s with his wonderful cartoons and intelligent editorial
sense.” Most importantly, say both Saltzmans, he never missed a
deadline.
But even as he poured his creative energy into editorial cartooning,
Plagens nervously looked on as classmates he considered “serious
painter-types” went off to start careers. “I thought, what am I trying
to be a cartoonist for? That’s not art!”
Graduating magna cum laude with a BFA in 1962, Plagens headed straight
to graduate school, thinking he could become an art teacher and support
himself as a painter. Wanting to be close to the Big Apple and its
lively art scene, he enrolled in an MFA program at Syracuse University,
which had offered him a free ride.
“Apparently I couldn’t read a map,” he reflects, “because Syracuse ain’t
spitting distance from New York City.” But it was close enough: Plagens
remembers vividly one five-hour trip to Manhattan in November 1962. He
and some buddies had piled into a Volkswagen and driven to Manhattan
just to see New Realism, an exhibition showcasing up-and-coming artists
like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. “I wouldn’t say I was present at
the creation of the movement,” Plagens says, “but a lot of people say it
was the first big show of its kind.”
MFA in hand, Plagens looked about for work but got no offers. “I
discovered that I wasn’t going to be an automatic all-star right out of
college,” he says. “Other artists were older, had more experience, had
more chops than I did. But I was a serious artist,” he adds, unlike the
variety that “liked to sit and drink in the studio more than they liked
to paint.”
In 1965, Plagens landed his first art-world job as assistant curator of
the Long Beach Museum of Art. Because it was a city job, and Long Beach
employees were required to live within city limits, Plagens found
himself residing 30 miles from the galleries of Los Angeles. Afraid he
would fall out of touch and wither into “a suburban artist,” Plagens
made himself drive to the offices of Artforum magazine, then on La
Cienega Boulevard, and inquire about writing freelance reviews. The
articles paid $5 a pop. “That would, I told myself, pay for the gas and
compel me to make the trip at least two Saturdays a month.”
In time, the assistant curator job gave way to faculty postings at
various institutions, from USC and Cal State Northridge to the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. All the while Plagens
continued painting and writing art reviews. “The inner competitiveness
got to me,” he explains. “I thought, ‘Why not the lead review? Why not a
feature? Why not the cover story?’”
He began writing longer works of art criticism, starting with Sunshine
Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970. Originally published in 1974 and
recently re-released, the book is generally considered the most
trenchant record of post-war American art history in the West. “A
remarkably large number of artists,” praised critic Hilton Kramer in the
New York Times Book Review, “are accorded brief and often very sharp
critical profiles.” It would go on to be a staple of art-history syllabi
at American universities. Plagens produced two more books: Both Kinds:
Contemporary Art from Los Angeles (1975) and Moonlight Blues: An
Artist’s Art Criticism (1986). He also contributed essays to critical
volumes on constructivist sculptor Don Gummer, minimalist painter Tony
DeLap and Pop Art master Ed Ruscha.
In 1989, Plagens’ name came up at a Newsweek editors’ roundtable on who
should replace departing art critic Mark Stevens. A lunch interview with
the managing editor – to make sure, Plagens jokes, that “I didn’t have
green hair and could eat with a knife and fork” – clinched the job.
The transition from academic to journalistic writing wasn’t an
effortless one. The buzz around Newsweek was that “something would have
to be done about my Faulknerian/Artforum prose,” Plagens remembers.
“‘Chop this baby up, please!’ was a frequent note from my editor.”
But being one of two art critics writing for a major national
newsmagazine (the other being his counterpart at Time) suits Plagens
nicely: “I’m paid to go see art I’d gladly have paid to go see,” he
says. “Who else gets sent to Holland to see the never-again Johannes
Vermeer exhibition and describe how the Dutch like their boy?”
The worst part of the job? Dealing with “famous people,” with their egos
and their entourages. Some notable exceptions: art historian E.H.
Gombrich; Pop Art pioneer R.B. Kitaj; avant-garde painter-icon Balthus;
and abstract sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Perhaps his favorite interview,
however, was with British transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard: “Two of
the best hours of my life,” he says.
And that’s what makes Plagens such a good critic, says Newsweek senior
writer David Gates: “He treats artists as people at work, and tells us
just what the work looks like. Sure, he’s enormously sophisticated about
theory, but he wears it lightly.”
Adds Newsweek’s arts and entertainment editor Jeff Giles: “[Peter] is
far and away the most genial, best-hearted person that I’ve ever worked
with. You could ask him to do something impossible on a ridiculous
deadline and he will absolutely, positively do it – without groaning,
which, at Newsweek, is rare. If I could, I would clone him.” (Both
editors, incidentally, mention Plagens’ orderly desk space.)
It hasn’t been easy being both painter and pundit. “I had to tell myself
sometimes that I was the art world’s operative at Newsweek, and not the
reverse – although that’s what Newsweek paid me to be,” he says.
Plagens, the artist, sometimes felt the backlash in the art community:
“There was some resentment ... at my playing both sides of the street,
so to speak,” he admits. “A byline in Newsweek does, after all, travel
faster than even the most famous painting.”
Unable to solve the dilemma, he ignored it. “I just went ahead, trying
on the one hand not to get to like the power a critic has, and on the
other, not ‘aw-shucks-ing’ it away.”
Though many now view him as a writer who happens to paint, he would
prefer to be known as a painter who happens to write criticism. (“If
other people think the reverse,” he acknowledges, “I can’t claim it’s
unfair.”)
In 1999, he muddied the waters a bit more with Time for Robo, a purely
literary foray. Library Journal calls it “one of the most creative
novels of the 1990s.... It’s rather astounding for a first-time novelist
best known as a painter and art critic to write a novel comparable to
those of Thomas Pynchon, Jim Dodge or Robert Coover.” Kirkus Review
compared Plagens’ prose to Beckett, dubbing the book “a fitfully amusing
extragalactic word salad.” His critic-colleagues at Newsweek chimed in
with their own bons mots: “[W]hat you’d expect from a guy whose first
Newsweek piece compared Cézanne to Ernest Tubb – a surreal waltz across
space, time and cultures.”
And still Plagens paints. And writes. And paints and writes some more.
It’s an affliction, he explains: “I write because I just can’t help it.
I talk too much; I write too much.”
But four years ago, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center
just blocks from his Tribeca loft, Plagens had nothing to say – neither
with his prose nor his paintbrush. It was election day, Plagens recalls,
and he and his wife, artist Laurie Fendrich, had planned to cast their
ballots after a light jog. Returning home for a quick shower and change,
they heard the roar of a low-flying jet; then an explosion. The ground
shook. Eighteen minutes later, the same thing again. When Plagens
stepped outside, the first tower was starting to collapse. “I could see
the smoke – like Godzilla – just barreling toward me.”
His neighborhood had become a war zone. About 3,000 people had died
violent deaths a few blocks away. City officials searched the roof for
body parts. The smell of charred flesh was unbearable. Fendrich
developed a lung infection; one of their cats died. “It was the worst
thing I’ve ever been through,” he says. “To this day, I still can’t look
at any of the images – I just can’t stand to look.”
But with the exception of that unspeakable nightmare, Plagens continues
to speak volumes in both words and brush strokes. In February, he made
several appearances at USC in conjunction with his show at the Fisher
Gallery. He’s looking forward to another show of his paintings at the
Nancy Hoffman Gallery. In the fall, he’ll be a visiting professor at
Middlebury College in Vermont. And he’s writing a new novel.
“It’s strange how you end up with what you want to be, if things go
right and it sticks in your head,” Plagens muses, gazing serenely at his
fastidiously kept home.
“Here I am living in New York, I live in a loft, I have this place up in
the country. I’m married to an artist who also teaches. I have great
kids. It’s a good life.”
Nick P. Divito ’99 is a Brooklyn-based freelancer and former
editor-in-chief of the Daily Trojan.
