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III.
Letter from James Perry Wilson
Letter from James Perry Wilson
“I might raise an erotic storm, powerful enough to tea
up trees by the roots.”
up trees by the roots.”
Soren Kierkegaard,
Either/Or
I.
His passing appearance in internal museum reports, invoices, and administrative timelines is seldom as more than a scheduling concern. One what. One what. His biographical file carries a note of introduction from “friends worried information about him will become scattered.” A “Museum Personalities” item published in Spring 1948 is the rare document, just one page long, dedicated to presenting him to the public. “This museum personality has the most photographed back in the museum,” the article claims, “because he is usually to be found (in a costume admirably suited to the warm, dark corridors) facing the wall to ply the each calculated brush stroke of his trade.”
“Though of gentle and assuming nature,” it continues, “he is never one to stoop because of his height. He stands erect and meets the stars in their courses.”
His the and returned with and a ten-gallon hat he wore around the museum. Two years later, the curator mailed the donor a picture with a note attached: “No photograph can do it adequate justice,” the note reads, “The atmospheric quality of the late afternoon setting has subtle qualities which cannot be put down on paper.”
Curator Harold Hall’s lament was just one of many attempts to describe the strange, numinous aspect which inheres in James Perry Wilson’s paintings. One seems to see straight through them, through the glass and paint, the laborious technique and human hours, and out the other side, into the pure wilderness—that great source—as though it were real; as though it existed and one were there in person, breathing it in. It is a quality which no photograph can do justice, Hall wrote. One colleague called it the “breath of life,” another called it Catholicism--both, that the murals opened a “spiritual,” rather than empirical, “window onto nature.” Through this window, something entered the work, a spirit which looked back out from perfect illusion.
The nature of this “shining forth,” as Hegel would put it, was light. The paintings seemed to “glow,” to burn inside, viewers claimed, as though the paint were kindling insights more luminous than its matte sums. It was an effect that not there in the image, that could not be pointed to, yet made the entire surface tremble with its touch. Someone once turned the lights out to ensure the paintings were not casting their own, glowing in a row like streetlamps down the corridor.
That simple paint had produced such a numinous quality begged how the human art to make what had not been made by human hands. Some sought explanation in the rigid, rational techniques Wilson used to paint his murals, as “instruments of science,” he claimed, rather than painting. Despite Hall’s curatorial disclaimer, indeed almost his entire process, beginning to end, had passed through a camera lens and been put to paper; had been gridded, measured, predicted, weighed, tested, sketched, modeled, and planned. Others felt it must be an expressive dimension not reducible to technique, a subjective element that exceeded his rigorous objectivity, glowing from within. These sought resolution in the artist: in something affective and biographical—some private, personal meaning that was finding expression. “Their delicate truth can only be a reflection of the sensitivity of the artist,” one of his closer friends speculated--yet even to her little about “Perry” was known, and even less did he permit to enter his work.
It was not until 1943 that the synthesis between Adorno would call technique and expression.
Set up a dialectic between what Theodor Adorno calls “technique” and “expression.”
an inexplicable glimmer that appeared to illuminate the innermost soul of the painting.
II.
“Did you ever think on what a small chance lay some of the pleasantest things in life?,” James Perry Wilson wrote to Thanos Johnson in 1944, “If I had not happened to leave the door to the Mule Deer enclosure open on a certain day that summer, —if I hadn’t happened to notice an interested-looking soldier standing outside, and hadn’t invited him in, I might never had the pleasure of knowing you. I’m certainly glad that I did.”
Wilson was a museum. He enclosures to paint in silence; but on what, when the two met, happened to leave them open.
On X. On X. On XX, 1941, he was sent west with a credential letter: “The bearer of this letter, Mr. James Perry Wilson, of the staff of this museum, is now proceeding to Wyoming and Kansas to collect certain definite materials and information for our new Hall of North American Mammals now under construction.”
In what he explains his elaborate techniques.
It was outside the letters, however, that Wilson explained expressive what.
Although he was committed to the utmost realism, there was indeed an immaterial and inarticulable dimension to Wilson’s practice, one he attempted to relay when the two painted together side-by-side. In interviews Johnson describes painting under Wilson’s guidance in almost spiritual terms: “He was sitting down right next to me while I was painting,” he says, and “made me aware of what I should be concerned about; how the aspens here are and so on. It was not quite philosophy but…He wanted to get you to a feeling beyond the photograph.” There was a silent stress placed on seeing past semblance and into something that had not yet appeared: “I don’t think it was conscious, but he went beyond the painting…It wasn’t what I was seeing—it was beyond what I was seeing. It’s very difficult to explain.”
Although Wilson’s letters gesture toward this “beyond” in technical terms—layers, importance, tonality—it was, as Johnson intimates, deeper and more intuitive, an endangered nonempirical element buried deep inside his rational process. “He taught me to think beyond what was there,” Johnson claimed—to imitate something that did not—was not allowed to—exist.
Thanos Johnson kept Wilson’s letters in special binders that Wilson provided him and wrote on matching special paper Wilson would replenish. The paper was lined, three-hole, 8”*7”; sent airmail, ground, or both. The letters were accompanied with drawings, photographs, postcards, paintings, presents, newspaper clippings—about the opera, about the dioramas—but never about the events which headlined the papers each morning.
In his a morality play between reason and its opposite, between subject and object, culture and nature, domination and love.