George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders

by J. Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, Suzette McAvoy
Published by Marshall Wilkes, Inc.
Independent Fine Art Publishers Maine and New York
For more information contact the publisher at info@marshallwilkes.com

Advance copies available at marshallwilkes.com
Hardcover, 184 pages
11 x 11 inches
184 Color Illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-0-2
Price: $65.00 USD
Available January 2012

Download a PDF preview copy. (2.5 MB)

George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders The artworks in this book are the culmination of over sixty years of making art by American artist George Wardlaw (b. 1927). Beginning in 1950 with non-objective painting and progressive metalsmithing, Wardlaw’s artwork evolved into a lifelong dialogue between abstraction and spirituality. Crossing Borders chronicles Wardlaw’s singular quest through a prolific body of work that includes an ongoing series of monumental sculptures and large abstract canvases. Critical essays by art historians J. Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, and Suzette McAvoy place Wardlaw’s artwork in context with relevant movements of his time, reveal the remarkable breadth of his technical mastery, and elucidate the development of his unique aesthetic vision.

From growing up on a farm in Mississippi during the hard years of the Great Depression to becoming a member of the avant-garde art scene in New York City during the 1950s and ’60s, Wardlaw emerged from his meager beginnings to become a significant figure in American art and an influential teacher and academic. After serving in World War II, Wardlaw used the GI Bill to attend Memphis Academy of Arts. His career evolved quickly from studying and then teaching at the University of Mississippi (with David Smith, Jack Tworkov, and Reginald Neal), to exhibiting his work at major New York art galleries, to teaching at Louisiana State University, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and Yale University. In 1968 Wardlaw moved to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he chaired the art department for the remainder of his academic career.

Never confined by categories, Wardlaw explores medium, scale, form, and color on his quest for creative and spiritual resolution. From Christianity to Judaism, from the rural south to the urban northeast, from painting to sculpture, and back again, Wardlaw produced series after series of profound artworks, including his signature apple paintings, monumental sculptures based on Jewish history and identity, and evocative shore paintings based on the coast of Maine. Over 170 color plates and illustrations highlight this remarkable body of work.

His [Wardlaw’s] passionate exploration of modes and expressions has taken him in practice from jewelry-making to painting to monumental sculpture; in subject matter from lofty religion to humble apples to the rugged coast of Maine. He has aptly described his art as a kind of collage...of different places, times, experience, materials. —Grace Glueck
Grace Glueck served for many years as an art writer and critic for The New York Times

Book Events

George Wardlaw Installation: Passage into Abstraction

Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, Maine, will host an exhibition for American artist George Wardlaw in conjunction with the launch of Wardlaw’s book George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders at the Art Palm Beach Art Fair, January 20–23, 2012. The three sculptures in the installation, Parting of the Red Sea, The Burning Bush, and The Ark of the Covenant, are part of Wardlaw’s Exodus I and II Series, which consist of fourteen large-scale acrylic and aluminum sculptures based on Jewish history and identity. These monumental sculptures cross the boundaries of religious perception and abstraction—“they forcibly generate a mystical spiritual sense of necessity, both pleasing and fearful,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1988.

The Exodus series represents Wardlaw’s desire to pass between figuration and abstraction, literalism and metaphor, between symbols and their meanings, and an aesthetic that offers pure emotion rather than intellectual exercise. The negotiation of parallel borders—between servitude and freedom, wilderness and homeland, ethnic and spiritual identity—are essential to the narrative of Exodus and reflect the crisscrossing paths within the journey of Wardlaw’s own life.

These unique sculptures are intended for a gargantuan space—each piece can stand alone, or they can stand together—in any number of configurations—like the tribes of Israel and the families within each tribe and the individuals within each family. These sculptures cut across artistic expectations and diverse religious boundaries to reveal a common spiritual concern.

Artwork Descriptions
Parting of the Red Sea
acrylic on aluminum
92 x 204 x 66 inches
1989–1992

The Ark of the Covenant
acrylic on aluminum
70 x 120 x 33 inches
1989–1992

Burning Bush
acrylic on aluminum
100 x 116 x 60 inches
1989–1992

Lecture with Ori Z. Soltes

Event: “Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw”
SpeakerOri Z. Soltes
Date: Saturday, January 21
Time: TBA
Place: Art Palm Beach Art Fair
Palm Beach County Convention Center
650 Okeechobee Boulevard
West Palm Beach, Florida 33401
Book Signing: with George Wardlaw and Ori Z. Soltes immediately following the lecture

"Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw"

The art of George Wardlaw offers an ongoing dance between immutable ideas and those that keep changing. He has never allowed his work to stay confined by categories—his painting is sculptural, his sculpture is both painterly and architectural, and his early small-scale metalsmithing resonates with his later gargantuan artworks. Wardlaw’s work reflects art history in both its universal concerns and, in a varied array of works, in the questions that art history raises for contemporary Jewish artists: Where does our work fit into Western art, which for so many centuries has been largely Christian art? What sorts of subjects are particularly relevant to “Jewish” art? What elements of style and symbol apply? How obvious or covert ought the reflections to these issues be? His work is a dazzling expression of diversely shaped identity and intensity.

Biography for Ori Z. Soltes

Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where he curated over eighty exhibitions on a variety of subjects. He is the author of articles, exhibition catalogs, essays, and books on a range of topics, including Fixing the World: American Jewish Painters in the Twentieth Century, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East Is a Mess and Always Has Been. He is currently completing a book on the definition of Jewish art and architecture called Tradition and Transformation.