by Norman E. Pendergraft

Where Myth Stirs: Paintings by Jim Moon

An Essay By Norman E. Pendergraft Director, North Carolina Central University Art Museum written for the 1992 retrospective exhibition of Jim Moon’s paintings at NCCU

Jim Moon paints in a beautiful studio on his fifty acre farm in Davidson County in the western Piedmont of North Carolina. The artist has a few animals and plants a garden, but the rural setting is for his pursuit of painting, not agriculture.

Friends and their guests are always welcome at the main house and nearby studio. Moon designed both and they possess the simple elegance of an Italian villa. The Italian connection is natural for the artist who went to Europe with the U.S. Army in 1951 and has spent some of most years in Italy since then. He owned a house in Asolo (in Palladian country) from 1961 until 1976. Moon met Peggy Guggenheim in 1952 and was always welcome in her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice. In 1970 she gave one of her Jim Moon works(*1) to the North Carolina Museum of Art. Their friendship continued until her death in December 1979.

A native of Graham, North Carolina, Moon has traveled widely since the mid-forties. He studied at Cooper Union and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill before being drafted. As a veteran, he studied in Perugia, Italy, and at Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary (now Virginia Commonwealth University) where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1957. Graduate studies have taken him to Mexico City College, the Boston Museum School, and Columbia University.

The influential artists/teachers, from the early years, are his Cooper Union instructors Sidney Delavante and Robert Gwathmey (painting), Milton Hebald (sculpture), Henrietta Schutz (two- dimensional design), and Byron Thomas (painting techniques). He recalls their approaches as simple and practical and he found them accessible and generous. Among his contemporaries whose work he especially respects are painters Don Manfredi, Harold Stevenson,(*2) and Tancredi and sculptors Robert Creman and William King.(*3)

Following the example of his Cooper Union mentors, Jim Moon has, while creating a large body of art, frequently taught art in northern and southern states and abroad. Among others, his teaching appointments have included those at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Hofstra University, and Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and its program in Asolo, Italy.(*4) He founded and was director of the Visual

Arts Department for the North Carolina School of the Arts,(*5) Winston-Salem, from 1967 through 1971, and continues to maintain close ties there.

The painter very early found his own style, one I describe as neo-surrealistic, although the artist objects. Jim Moon does not need to be categorized, and he does not follow or subscribe to any group or school’s creed or manifesto. This exhibition which represents four decades of his paintings illustrates that he has gone his own way.(*6) We see he has clearly been a loner as he has created wonderful dreamscapes. They are invariably set on a stage of commonplace things; however. Moon infuses them with a reality often different from ordinary experience. Frequently splendid animals or sea creatures are juxtaposed with humans in most unlikely settings and combinations. Moon never titles these dreamscapes, apparently not wishing to come between his visual statement and the spectator with a verbal narrative. The viewer must confront the picture from personal experience and find the meaning of the painting from a visual exchange. These paintings possess a feeling of intimacy, mystery, and mythic life—they generously feed the imagination. These attributes plus a sly wit and humor are present throughout Jim Moon’s work.

Jim Moon, an approachable and friendly person, has many long-time friends. Three he met in the latter half of the 1940s—Professor William Hull, Dorothy McNerney,(*7) and George Gallowhur— were very supportive friends during their lives. They loved and purchased his pictures and opened doors for the talented young southern painter in a nurturing, nondemanding, and encouraging manner. The three lived to see the artist achieve professional success and prove the wisdom of their encouragement and faith and joy in his creations. All three built fine collections of Moon’s work and each is represented in this exhibition. Hull lived the longest and left the largest collection, willed to his brother Milfred Hull with the request that he and Jim Moon in consultation “select an appropriate museum or other institution for their display or other similar uses.”(*8) The collection was not available for this exhibition.

Professor Hull was an award-winning, distinguished teacher of English at Hofstra University (1 946-1984) and a prolific poet. Many of his poems were inspired by Moon’s paintings which he collected from the mid-forties until his death in 1984. The oil I call “Oasis” was the last painting Dr. Hull chose to purchase just before his death. It came back from New York to the artist after the professor’s death and has been purchased by one of Hull’s outstanding former students, the distinguished author Marilyn French. She responded to my request for personal reminiscences of Moon:

”My major exposure to Moon’s work occurred on my many visits to William Hull. I was deeply moved and impressed by it. For me, his images seem rooted in childhood, an innocent, vivid, colorful vision of the world offered as if he knows (as I am sure he does) that the most important forces driving adults lie in childhood. His brilliant blending of artistic allusions translates this child’s vision into adult terms, an adult mode, so he presents the vital, elemental, in life with ultimate sophistication with no loss of force or freshness. In the process, he creates myth.”(*9)

Professor Hull wrote in 1983 of Jim Moon’s effect on his work. His statement provides the title for this exhibition.

”I think it a pity the work of Jim Moon is not better known, but from early on he eschewed fadmongers and went his own probing consolidating way. To grow in the eye as you collect is a delight, and that has been my forty-year experience with Moons. Time and again bringing yesterday’s looking to a new piece bumped against bafflement, until prejudice dissolved and out of the material carefully prepared and executed shone marvelously invented interrelations, stunning forms, colors and textures, always re-illuminating earlier Moons and revealing masterfully absorbed and new-handled traditions with largeness of soul and often a wicked wit.

The images presented, all striking on the yearning where myth stirs, are of essential loneliness, the vulnerability of the caught in a moment extracted from change and frozen.

This is the American art of my time, along with the Graham dance and Ezra Pound’s verse, that has most affected me and my work.”(*10)

Frequently artists are inspired by or find the source for an art work in another artist’s creation. Poet William Hull is not the only artist to acknowledge the influence of Moon’s pictures on his creations. Michael Beckerman and Ralph Hewitt worked together to create the Asolarido Suite ballet, inspired by an Aslolando Suite of eighteen serigraphs Jim Moon made some thirty years ago. Victorian poet Robert Browning invented the word Asolando meaning to enjoy one’s self under the sun. Beckerman, a music professor at Washington University, St. Louis, composed the music;” and Hewitt of the North Carolina Dance Theatre and School of the Arts, choreographed the ballet Asolando Suite which premiered in Lexington, North Carolina, 20 June 1986. Frank Getlein, nationally known art critic and writer, in his special review for the Lexington Dispatch (21 June 1986, p. 1) wrote:

”The best known poem Browning wrote in Asolo is the charming “Pippa Passes.” A good deal of the light, touching spirit of that short poem survives through last evening’s three translations across visual image, music and dance.

Filtered through that affectionate observation in all of the arts represented by the Suite, is the special quality of Italian street life that makes Italians and non-Italians alike happy to sit, lean or stroll, taking it all in and at the same time becoming part of it.”

Jim Moon’s work is not greatly influenced by other works of art, although they do recall the geometry of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca colored by the influence of Cubism and the lonely and uncanny space of the surrealists. The bold, strong influence on his work since 1952 is Italian light. He was welcomed to that influence by Peggy Guggenheim. She encouraged him to settle in the Veneto, and his art flourished in its light.

In 1979, Mrs. Guggenheim and Jim Moon met for the last time in London where he had gone to assist her in recovering from eye surgery. Theirs had never been as much an artist/patron relationship as it was a close friendship. Thus he was a little surprised when she offered to write something for his London show scheduled for mid-September. On 6 May 1979, she sent a note from Venice with a statement for the London exhibit. Moon feels it was her way of saying good-bye. I end this essay with Peggy Guggenheim’s note:

”Here are the paintings by my wonderful friend Jim Moon. I hope they give the public the pleasure he has given me.” (*12)

Notes

Throughout this essay, I have relied on responses to a letter requesting personal reminiscences from many of Jim Moon’s long-time friends. The responses were impressive and helpful. All the letters informed me as I worked on this catalog, but only a few have been quoted because of space limitations. These responses are part of the artist’s personal archives. In the notes below, an asterisk (‘) indicates mate- hal gathered in this process or otherwise part of those archives. The quotations displayed with the illustrations are also from these letters.

*1. The untitled serigraph (1967, 23/25), a colorful abstraction, is illustrated in black and white in the North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin (11, nos. I & 2, December 1971, p. 64). In 1972, New York art critic Stuart Preston gave his print from this edition to the Museum of Modern Art. Monroe Wheeler, Chairman, Committee on Drawings and Prints, in his thank you lettert to Preston (22 April 1971) wrote: ”We were pleased to have the opportunity of adding- work by the artist to the collection. Moon’s use of the serigraph technique reflects a significant return to more representational modes of composition.”

*2. Artist Harold Stevenson has kindly granted permission to quote a section from his forthcoming autobiography, The Gospel According to Harold:

“Probably most artists hope to become mythicized. I happen to have been there (New York City, 1949) when the myth of Jim Moon first stirred. He and I were painter- rebels—fighting against the deluge of ‘abstract expressionism’. In those days we often got drunk at Mary’s Bar on 8th Street in Greenwich Village with Jackson Pollack and other now mythological giants—arguing about life’. Serious artists, drunk or sober, seldom talk about ‘art’. After all, it is the making of life that produces art. Jim and I were among the first if not the very first Post Surrealists: the young Americans who in the early years after World War II knew personally the Surrealists who had taken refuge in New York during the war—Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and Pavel Tchelitchew being the titans.

Jim’s world (in his pictures and his private life) was always well defined; certainly not ‘explained’. God forbid!

Also during our time in the Village, we had a great friend, Dorothy (Tib) McNerney, who patronized the artists she liked with mote than an occasional purchase. She gave a party at her handsome brick townhouse that lasted the best part of an entire year. Every artist in the Village dropped in including the big teacher-guru Hans Hoffmann, and during that party Jim and I held a marathon conversation that lasted three days and nights without interruption… we were very young and spirited. Unfortunately no one went around with tape recorders in 1950! I pass-on this little bit of gossip because I feel certain that it throws light on the wonderful gut- secrets in Jim’s paintings. Also, I am the subject of a mini-series of gouaches he did in the early 1950s. It’s nice to have one’s memories depicted for posterity. And then all these intervening years have come and gone, and through it all Jim and I have remained devoted—surviving France, Italy, Mew York, Boston, Vermont, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and all the in between places and spaces. Yes, Jim is constant in his work and in his friendships. And like the multitude of those friends, I dearly love him.”

*3. From a statement* by King, 10 October 1990:

”Jimmy and I were fellow-students at Cooper Union 1945—48 and yes roommates (with Bill Haynes) for most of that time (at 314 E. 9th St.) I used to lock him in the bathroom occasionally just for meanness. He used to call me “St. Cecilia” when I played the tiny pump-organ. I’ve always thought Jim adventurous and inventive and way before his time. For instance he was doing abstract expressionist [paintings] in 1946! He was doing West-Coast-Light-Shows via glass-slide sandwiches of liquid colors heating up in [a] projector, making all kinds of squirmy, wild looking images on the wall. - . - College room-mates have an ineradicable connection. He lives in my heart.”

*4. DL Giorgio Zanesco, an architect, was president of the tourist office (Pro Asolo) at the time Jim Moon was starting Salem College’s Asolo program and the first tours of the North Carolina Dance Theatre. His letter of 24 November 1990 recalls Moon as

”a man of big authority and strong character. . . [whose] requests were always a benefit to Asolo . . . . We created extraordinary ballet-shows that had as [a] natural background the Castello della Regina Cornaro. . . - Thanks to Jim many young students of the North Carolina School got to know Asolo. I remember with great pleasure, the paintings that came out of his paint brush.”

*5. From a letter* from William Baskin, Ph.D., President, Educational Advisory Services, Winston-Salem, NC., 9 October 1990:

”I was privileged to have served as Academic Dean of the North Carolina School of the Arts at the time Jim Moon was a member of the Visual Arts faculty and, indeed, founder of that program. I also spent a wonderful summer in Asolo with a study abroad program sponsored by Salem College. This program combined music, visual arts and Italian language.

I am not very adept at art criticism and the vocabulary of the critic, but I do know that Jim is a consummate artist.”

*6. In her letter,* Elenore Lust, founder of the Norlyst Art Gallery, writes:

”In the early nineteen forties, Jim Moon came into the Norlyst Art Gallery on East 56th Street, New York City. Jimmy Ernst (son of Max) and I were co-directors. Jim M., like many emerging artists thought of New York City as an art Mecca . . . but the art scene at that time was alive with raucous dissention. There were the die-hard academicians rigidly following the esthetic requirements of the old Academy; there were the “modernists” who leaned towards the Impressionists; and the pure Abstractionists and abstract-expressionists doing a great deal of in-fighting. For all, color [w]as an issue, form was an issue.. .and into this battleground came a personable, handsome, reticent young man who had been thinking and FEELING, and painting about human, more universal ideas—about man himself. Using a uniquely personal idiom, he made a visually unforgettable statement about the origins of human “being,” and our collective unconscious.

Jimmy E. and I were immediately interested in his work and included it in our exhibitions. Fortunately, there were a number of discerning collectors who recognized (still recognizing) his talent, and his reputation as a fine artist over the years has increased. . . . I am happy to say.”

*7. See note 2.

*8. From the Last Will and Testament of William Hull, Art. VII (a).

*9. From French’s letter to me, 8 October 1990.

*10. Dr. William Hull, Hofstra University, 14 August1983, open statement.

*11. Beckerman grew up with Jim Moon’s work. His father, Bernard Beckerman, the late Chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, wrote in an open statement, 13 September 1983:

”His ability to show us the sublime and the innocent both charms and amuses. I have long been an admirer of Jim Moon’s mastery of color, content, and contradiction. Living with his work provides constant challenge and refreshment.”

*12. Peggy Guggenheim to Jim Moon, 6 May [1979].