In Memoriam: James Adley (1931-2015)

James Adley, 1995.  (Photo: © Patrick T. Power. Used by permission.)

Last month, my undergrad painting instructor and mentor James Adley died at age 83. As I wrote four years ago in my blogpost on his 2011 show at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, which I co-curated with Robert Schefman, I first met Jim at Michigan State in the early 1970s. A student of Clyfford Still, he was the first true artist I got to know up close and personal.

My first visit to Jim's studio, which at the time was in an upstairs loft in downtown Williamston, completely blew me away, as he unrolled canvas after canvas, each one of more enormous proportions than one before, all of them covered with graceful parabolas and striations of color, layered atop one another so that pictorial space modulated with the trace of painterly event. I distinctly remember one of deep purple and black pigment mixed with Rhoplex, built up in sedimentations of gesture, made I later found out by using floor squeegees, push brooms, and garden rakes as painting implements. A master colorist, Jim was just as happy using castoff commercial house paint, gotten from the "mistakes" made by mixers at the nearby hardware store, as the best Winsor & Newton acrylics. He once told me that ultimately all the colors are related to one another; the trick is simply to put them together the right way.

Jim was a serious devotee of music, and many of our conversations were about music as much as art. Like Kandinsky and a number of other abstract artists, particularly of the Modernist persuasion, compositional strategies and other musical inspirations factored into Jim's work. Many of his paintings were titled in a manner similar to musical compositions—the "Bagatelle" series of the 1980s, for example, and the many paintings referencing works by modern British composers, such as Sir Michael Tippett and Vaughn Williams. For a period, he used John Cage's aleatory methods to dictate his painterly decisions. (Jim also pointed out that Mozart did something similar, getting up in the morning and throwing dice to determine what type of composition he would write that day and then throwing dice again to determine the number and types of instruments.) The composer I think of most in relation to Jim is Gustave Mahler, whose sprawling symphonies marked the transition from late Romanticism at the end of the nineteenth century to Modernism early in the twentieth. Similarly, Jim's expansive canvases—the triptych I39A-C: Prelude, Transition, Finale (1988-89), measures 11 feet high and 100 feet wide—register the limits of Modernist easel painting and its ambitions of achieving utopian fields of pure presence.

The large scale and subtle modulations of form and color of Jim's paintings made them extremely difficult to capture photographically, one of the fall outs being to severely limit his ability to market himself. His uncompromising dedication to grand proportion and pure abstraction, combined with diffidence as it pertains to the "artist's hustle," didn't help much either. There were really no local galleries that could do justice to the work in part due to its scale, although several—Cantor/Lemberg when it was in Birmingham, Christine Schefman when she had her own space on Eton Street, and Sharon Zimmerman when she ran Detroit Artists Market—to their credit tried. And as time wore on, along with the rise of Postmodernism, there was less and less interest in Jim's kind of work, isolating him further, though he kept on painting away. Most of Jim's paintings, and in particular many of the best ones, have never been seen outside his studio and I feel extremely privileged to have been one of the few so blessed with having had the experience on many occasions over the past four decades.

He wasn't completely overlooked, however. He did receive a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. I was also able to get a review of his stunning exhibition at the Muskegon Museum published in the October 1989 issue of Artforum; although, I got in a bit of trouble for it. According to the reviews editor, Scott Gutterman, one of the Italian editors of Artforum had asked where the hell Muskegon was. I responded to Scott: "It's where the art was." Still, he cautioned, Artforum chronicles activity originating from recognized world "art centers" and I needed to pay attention to that. I was reminded of something Jim once said that if Jackson Pollock had stayed in Cody, Wyoming, no one would have ever known who he was. (Certainly, the evidence from research in the sociology of art bears that out. And more distressingly for me in Jim's case, Pierre-Michel Menger's empirical research on the unequal distribution of material rewards and recognition in the arts suggesting that artists who are unknown at the time of their deaths are overwhelmingly doomed to forever remain obscure. Menger's first monograph in English, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty, published last year by Harvard University Press, is an essential, if sobering, read. And I have worried in recent years as to what will happen to the trove of Jim's paintings currently rolled up in storage in a basement in mid-Michigan. This is a problem not for only Jim but for many artists who have left estates largely consisting of their work.)

The sculptor and Jim's friend from their early days in London, William Tucker, wrote a heartfelt tribute titled "Grand Symphonic Paintings" published in the online magazine Art Critical. Another written by British painter James Faure Walker was published in The Guardian. Both are worth checking out.

Installation view at the Muskegon Museum of Transition, 1988-1998 (Acrylic on canvas, 120" x 744").

James Adley, Carmine, 2007 (Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 36").

Even in his final months in a nursing home, Jim kept painting. Below is a video of a talk he gave to residents about his current work. On the one hand, it's difficult to see him all contorted and frail—in his prime he stood nearly six-and-a-half feet tall with a penetrating gaze as the above portrait of him by Patrick T. Power testifies. But on the other hand, there is the appreciation of the fact that he kept working literally almost to his dying day. There is a small beauty in the video at 16:50, a departure, actually, from his more typical color field work.

Jim's wife Alison McMaugh was also a fine painter. She died of ovarian cancer in 2005. They are survived by their son Raphael Adley, who lives in Lansing. It was my great privilege to have known both Jim and Alison, whose work I also wrote about for Art & Australia among other publications. It is my sincere hope that against all odds, both will finally get their due in times to come.

A memorial service for James Adley will be held on Sunday, May 31, 2:00 p.m. in Gallery 114, Kresge Art Center, at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Click here for a map.

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YouTube video of Jim's memorial held at Kresge Art Center, MSU, East Lansing:

James Adley at 80

James Adley, Violet Gate, 2007. Acrylic on paper (Image courtesy of the artist.)

On Friday, February 18, the Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center is presenting an exhibition of recent work by former Michigan State University art professor James Adley. The show includes works on canvas and paper completed over the past four years. My colleague at College for Creative Studies, Foundations Department Chair Robert Schefman, and I curated the show. While it takes up the entire Robinson Gallery, it represents just a taste of Adley's work from this period and the merest sliver of his substantial oeuvre, a small fraction of which has ever been seen outside his studio. (Full disclosure: Schefman and I are both MSU BFAs, and Adley was the main professor under which I did my undergrad work. Schefman studied sculpture and though we were there at around the same time I didn't know him then.)

Large, gestural abstractions, Adley's paintings are the kind you don't see too much of anymore, and the kind you never saw a lot of in Detroit, produced locally at least. (The exceptions are Aris Koutroulis, whose constructions of raw canvas held together with pigment always seemed a little contrived, and Ellen Phelan, whose brief encounter with splashy large-scale, shaped canvases in the mid-1980s is still the best work she's ever done to my eye -- lucky the Kresge Foundation, which owns some.) There's a direct line from Adley to the heroic age of postwar American abstraction, aesthetically and biographically. A student of Clyfford Still's, Adley needs about 180 square feet of painting field to really get cooking and happily this show includes a couple of paintings on that scale. In particular is Red Passage (2007), an arc of pigment over a field of rose-stained canvas that starts as an inky blot on the left and skitters across the picture plane, transmuting into shades of red along the way.

The show is filled out with several series of smaller canvases and works on paper where the artist explores gestural motifs that isolate elements, which in earlier work used to get submerged in encrustations of paint applied with trowels, squeegees, push brooms, rakes, and whatever else the artist had lying around the studio that could be pressed into service as a mark-making implement. As a counterpoint, the BBAC show includes a painting from 1973 where the picture plane is filled with alternating vertical bands of white and blue upon which a pattern reminiscent of musical notation unfurls.

James Adley, 2010.

It was only in laying out the show at the BBAC that it hit me why that older painting seemed so familiar. The chair of the art department at MSU had it in his office when I went there as a junior, beret in hand, to beg for money after I lost my entire term's materials budget in a drug deal gone sour. As it turns out, I ended up getting double the allotment I had stupidly lost, though I can't say I recommend it as a way to finance your art.

Adley has been in failing health over the last couple of years and it's likely that this may be the last new work we see from him. But like a lot of late work by great artists (I'm thinking in particular of Beethhoven's String Quartets, William S. Burroughs's triology Cities of the Red Night, Place of the Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, and Picasso's final paintings), Adley's new work isn't a summation or recapitulation but the record of another step in an ongoing journey to open new doors of perception, tempered perhaps with the knowledge that time is running out.

"James Adley at 80: Recent Paintings, Works on Paper" opens at the Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center Friday, February 18, from 6 - 8 pm. The exhibition runs until March 18. Call 248 644 0866 for information.