by Frank Getlein
One immediate response to a group of paintings by Jim Moon is, for many viewers, “Oh, Surrealism.” Like many immediate reactions, this calls for tranquil reflection.
To appreciate this artist’s work in anything like its rich complexity, the viewer must separate it from Surrealism. There are occasional points of contact — unlikely juxtapositions of things represented, and other things simply impossible in real life yet presented in straightforward assurance that what you see is what is happening. More than occasionall the viewer senses the aura of human sexuality.
The points of no-contact are more important. In Moon’s work there is neither Freudianism nor Marxism, and there is not the slightest hint of pretentiousness. In contrast to many, even most, major works of Surrealism, Moon’s paintings never come as proclamations. They merely present. They ask only that you look, because if you do F. look, you will think about them. The last thing in the world they will prompt you to think about is where to place these paintings in the long history of art.
Obviously they are 20th century, obviously American. Yet they hardly less obviously have connections with or memories of the Italian 1400s. That’s not surprising, because Italy in general and its 15th century in particular have probably had more influence on Jim Moon as human being and as artist than any other factor in his life.
Italy turns up regularly in the paintings — and in the life, in which he customarily ends telephone conversations with a brisk ‘Ciao” (although he does not answer the phone with “Pronto”), and in which he is working to complete a shockingly authentic Palladian villa in a grove of trees on his 40-acre farm in that part of North Carolina gratifyingly known as the Piedmont.
Italy is also present in the unlikely painting of the red simian perched on the wall above the two young lovers. All of the inanimate elements in the scene are Italian. They are also rectangles, or, most of them, actually truncated triangles used to represent rectangles seen in perspective. The stone wall the ape is perched on is travertine marble, the least valued in Italy but immensely fashionable among American architects for decades now. Like the travertine, the stone the lovers walk on is Italian, the same marble you find all over the streets of Venice, the Veneto and even small towns a long way down the coast of poor Dalmatia. Inside the travertine wall are paving stones alternately pink and beige, each bordered by weeds or wild grasses. These end at the far wall, which presumably joins the one on which the red ape sits in the foreground. On that distant wall, a naked man confronts a hairy ape: in conversation? mutual questioning? shared bemusement?
Travertine and paving stones alike move in perspective (the Italian invention), toward an unseen vanishing point (another) behind the red ape. The lovers therefore stroll toward an urban infinity that by definition cannot exist. The red ape connects with the naked man by a curving swath of pink and beige stones, and plays a decidedly odd game of chess, perhaps related to the queries the light man and dark ape may be mutually posing. Thus, in luminous, measured, quattrocento space, three pairs are placed at varying distances and levels: woman and man, man and ape, ape and intellectual play. The meaning? The first meaning and assuredly the only one you’d get from Jim Moon is, Think about it.
Moon’s own thoughts about Italy go way back, to the beginnings of his serious career, perhaps earlier. Born in Graham, North Carolina, in that year of national disaster, 1929, Moon went to local schools and in 1945, at 16, was admitted to Cooper Union in New York, where tuition was free and the only qualification was talent.
His roommate at Cooper was William King, the sculptor, who remembers Moon as adventurous and inventive” in his art. His principal instructors included his fellow Southerner, Robert Gwathmey, and sculptor Milton Hebald, who went to Italy about the same time Moon did and has stayed in Rome and in the lakeside village of Bracciano ever since.
In 1952, after military service in Germany, Moon went to Venice, where he became lifelong friends with Peggy Guggenheim, staying often at her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now a museum. He bought a house in Asolo, in the Veneto, and lived there until 1965, making friends with artists, public officials and the people of Asolo, who had earlier caught the attention of another English speaking artist. Robert Browning lived there for a while and was as fascinated by the place and the people as Moon was. Browning produced a suite of poems derived from the experience, the best known being Pippa Passes.”
Jim Moon produced a suite of his own, 18 serigraphs titled with Browning’s word, Asolando. “Informed by the artist’s quick eye and intuitive perceptions, the suite offers a dozen and a half views of one day in the life of Asolo, focused more on the people than the place. The poet and the painter between them have made “Asolando” an enchanted village, like Brigadoon or Immensee. Thirty years later, in 1986, dancers from the North Carolina Dance Theatre, with the music by Michael Beckerman and choreography by Ralph Hewitt, produced a kind of ballet bouffe fashioned very closely on Moon’s images. The short dances and the brief snatches of music perfectly captured the comic insight and simultaneous sympathy the artist brought to his work. What cries out to be done Palladlo — although, not, perhaps, of Palladianism is a film or tape uniting music, dance and the — and that same magic illuminates constantly, original images. never distractingly, the paintings of Jim Moon.
What cries out more urgently to Jim Moon himself is the need to finish that Palladian villa in the woods and to open the art school for which it is the intended centerpiece. From Cooper Union on, he has enjoyed and performed well the teaching- learning experience in art. He has taught in a variety of academic and non-academic settings. In the first decade after his return from Italy, he went back to Asolo every summer with a traveling class of art students whose studio work was enriched enormously, like Moon’s own work, by Venice and by the light of the Veneto.
Asolo was well within the home country of Andrea Palladio and it is in that great architect rather than in any school of painting that we must seek Moon’s antecedents and influences. Art critics, including this one, have noted certain correspondences between Moon and, for example, Paulo Ucello and Piero della Francesca. But the clarity and the strong geometry of those two painters are also present, powerfully so, in Palladio. And the architect does something else. He made his reputation in the first place by building exquisite structures out of humble materials. This is what Jim Moon does in his painting. The people and their activities tend to be of the most ordinary sort. They are raised to a different level of being by the serious, never solemn, attention they get in Moon’s work,
Palladio would have approved of the fabric of Moon’s villa being of cinder blocks. The architect would have used them himself had they been at hand. The theatrical magic that illuminates Palladio’s last great work, the Teatro Olympico in Vicenza, is sometimes rather presumptuously denigrated as ‘un-Palladian.” It is the essence of Palladio – although, not, perhaps, of Palladianism – and that same magic illuminates constantly, never distractingly, the paintings of Jim Moon.
Frank Getlein, a Washington DC. based art critic of national distinction, wrote for The Washington Star, The New Republic, and The Milwaukee Journal. Author of more than twenty hooks, he has also written regularly for Art in America, Burlington Magazine (London), Smithsonian Magazine, and many other publications.
1993