Date of birth:
1933
Paris
Profession:
Artist
Student
1950 Summer Session in the Arts
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Paintings by Gourevitch
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EXTERNAL LINKS
Mary Ryan Gallery |
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In the
spring of 1950 Jacqueline Herrmann (Gourevitch) was a junior at the High
School of Music and Art in New York. She knew that she wanted to be a
painter, and a conventional college education held little interest for
her. Someone had suggested that she could study painting at Black Mountain
College in the
context of a general curriculum. When she learned that they had a summer
program, she wrote for a brochure, thinking she would see if it made sense
for later on. Both the mountainous setting - she had spent eight previous
summers in western Virginia and loved the South - and seeing that
Theodoros Stamos was that summer's painting teacher convinced her that she
should apply.
As was often the case with new students, Jacqueline's first impressions of
the college were vivid and disconcerting - the unkempt grand landscape,
"ramshackle" rustic buildings, and "beautiful people going one way or
another, each appearing totally focused and intent on what they were
doing." She was first taken to North Lodge, the women's dormitory, and
shown the large attic room which she was to share with three students -
Mary Fitton Fiore, Amy Mendelson Goldin, and Lucille Krasne. Walking
towards the modern "Bauhaus" Studies Building with its individual student
studios,she realized this "was the landscape was looking for, with a room
of my own to paint in and a view of the lake."
Jacqueline enrolled in some courses and audited others. Theodoros Stamos,
taught primarily through individual tutorials, visiting students' studios
to critique their work. He also set up a life drawing class with models
which surprised and intrigued Jacqueline who thought of him as an abstract
painter. Clement Greenberg's course in Art Criticism was to have a lasting
influence. She remembered particularly his emphasis on the flatness of the
picture plane and the way he established a linear progression in painting
beginning with Manet and "culminating in a sort of great crescendo with
the grid of Mondrian." She was amused at his concept of "the integrity of
the picture plane" since she thought of integrity as "a moral quality" and
the picture plane "as a given, something there for me to use." For many
years Greenberg's teaching stimulated a productive "interior dialogue". "I
read him and argued with him on my own. It saved me a lot of time later
because I had encountered it and worked through it so early on." Gradually
she came to understand his use of "integrity" as a "sort of Kantian
self-definition he imposed on painting". It did not seem to apply to the
painting she was most interested in and moved by. Paul Goodman's influence
was not so much through his teaching as his person - "he was enormously
charismatic and seductive... that was to me just utterly intriguing... it
was the intensity of his person.... he would put your life into question
at a very basic level, the way you conducted yourself, making you feel
that you were just not free, not sexually free, or that you were perhaps
too conventional...." Goodman, who that summer precipitated an "extremely
disruptive" crisis, was proselytizing, speaking openly of his
homosexuality in the presence of his wife and children, advocating sexual
freedom. This also was new to Jacqueline.
From Hazel Larsen Archer and her assistant Andrew "Andy" Oates, who taught
photography, she remembered that "because her polio confined her to a
wheelchair our class met where she lived for our critiques. There was an
atmosphere of extreme mutual respect, an awareness of the importance of
silence, an intense meditative, spiritual quality that permeated her
space, her aesthetic, and everything around her. That was new to me. I had
never before met people who recognized the actual trees and stones in one
another's photographs, one by one. It was inspiring. "
Jacqueline was surprised to feel "cherished" by some of the older European
refugees who took a grandparent-like interest in her, invited her to tea
and were intrigued by her unique accent. Born in 1933 in Paris where her
parents had fled after Hitler came to power in Germany, Jacqueline had
fled by foot with her family in 1940 over the Pyrenees into Spain and then
via Cuba to New York. Her father, Henry, was a businessman and her mother,
Sophie was a painter.
Experiencing the totality of that creative community immensely impressed
Jacqueline who was only sixteen years old. There she first heard Bartok,
Stravinsky and VillaLobos. "It seemed that's what my metabolism would
sound like if I could listen to it. It sounded completely familiar. It was
just an instant fit." She observed Katherine Litz and her dance students
practicing in the dining hall and saw her first Buster Keaton and
Eisenstein in the summer film program. "There was terrific conversation,
delicious banana bread at breakfast, concerts, and great dancing parties
on Saturday nights." Perhaps of most importance that summer was her sense
of the validity of her vocation as an artist. "It completely reinforced
and confirmed my sense of what I wanted to do, so that I emerged from
there as convinced as ever that I ought to paint, wanted to paint, and
maybe could paint."
Jacqueline considered returning to Black Mountain for college but felt she
was not prepared to benefit from the freedom it offered. Paul Goodman had
spoken very critically of the University of Chicago, describing it in a
way that appealed to Jacqueline, and it was the only college she applied
to. She attended the University of Chicago from 1951- 1957, taking courses
in liberal arts and in Art History. In 1954, she married Victor Gourevitch,
a graduate student there, who later taught Philosophy at Wesleyan
University in Middletown Connecticut from 1967 to 1995. There they reared
their sons Marc, a physician, and Philip, a writer.
While she took some courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art
Students' League, she never got an MFA, and although she taught painting
at Wesleyan University from 1978-89 and drawing at the Cooper Union from
1989-92, she did so only after years of painting independently, convinced
that experience as a painter, rather than a degree, was the essential
qualification for teaching art.
Jacqueline Gourevitch paints sky and clouds, encompassing earth and the
city that is now her home. Her subjects are often observed from a
distance, or a high place. Best known for her Cloud Paintings she has
written "... Sky has always been central to my painting. It is
inexhaustible. It is always there. Observing the sky inevitably leads to
reflection about the fugitive, the recurring, the abiding... My painting
has always been of and about nature, and intensely concerned with its
translation into paint."
Since 1997 Jacqueline Gourevitch and her husband have lived in New York
City where she continues to paint and exhibit her work. In 2000 Gourevitch
was awarded a Studioscape Residency, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan
Council, on the 91st floor in Tower #1 of the World Trade Center. Her work
has been exhibited widely and is in major collections in the United
States.
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