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Oct 28, 2024

The Daily Heller: Teaching Color, One Pigment at a Time – PRINT Magazine

Irwin Rubin: ’60s Polychrome, curated by SVA BFA Visual & Critical Studies faculty member Carmelle Safdie, features painted wood constructions made by the late artist, teacher and collector

Irwin Rubin: ’60s Polychrome, curated by SVA BFA Visual & Critical Studies faculty member Carmelle Safdie, features painted wood constructions made by the late artist, teacher and collector (1930–2006). A student of Josef Albers at Yale, Rubin was part of the generation of grads who went out to teach color and design across the U.S. His later contributions to the Cooper Architecture program under John Hejduk were featured in MoMA’s Education of an Architect show and catalog.

Rubin’s work has been absent from public view since the 1960s—and Safdie’s enthusiasm in the exhibition (on view through Oct. 24 at the SVA Flatiron Project Space) and the following interview helps compensate for this disappointing fact.

“Despite being a prolific and influential educator, Rubin’s own work—collages and color constructions, which he only made until 1966—have been largely overlooked, and many of the works in the show have either been in storage for decades, or never exhibited until today,” Safdie told me.

Safdie and Robert Wiesenberger also co-authored an accompanying catalog, which was designed by Darling Green.

What is it about Irwin Rubin’s work that appeals to you?Rubin’s work puts a grin on my face. I love the particular shapes and colors he fit into each composition, whether I’m getting lost in the deep canals of his large red construction, in the minutia of his teeny tiny collages, or find a gallery of candy pops smiling back at me. There’s also a pleasure to discovering his work through archival research, putting together the puzzle of his mostly overlooked career as I discover forgotten artworks in unexpected places.

Rubin appears to have been doing work in the Modern idiom that has one foot in graphic design and another in the art world. Do you agree?I would say yes about the graphic design and art world part, but I’m hesitant to peg him as a Modernist. In the 1960s Rubin had his foot in the door of both worlds, working as a book designer for McGraw Hill and teaching color theory at Pratt, while at the same time exhibiting with leading galleries—like Bertha Schaefer, Martha Jackson, Byron and Stable—in New York City. But while he was part of a creative lineage coming out of the Bauhaus, and was at the forefront of mid-20th-century shifts to color and design conventions—shifts that brought us the now-familiar psychedelic rock posters of the late ’60s, and the pink and orange of the Dunkin’ Donuts logo—Rubin did not at all consider himself a Modernist, due to his obsession with adornment, surface and decoration. In Candy Land: Irwin Rubin’s Color Constructions, the catalog essay for this show, Robert Wiesenberger points to Rubin’s passion for antiques, antiquities and architectural ornamentation from around the world and across centuries. By embracing Premodern forms, Rubin’s work never quite fit into the minimalism, pop and op idioms of his time—it can be seen through the lens of what is now known as Postmodernism.

How did Josef Albers influence his collage and 3D works?In the 1950s, Rubin took Albers’ color course at Yale three times. It was here that he discovered collage, traded his brushes and easel in for a utility knife and table, and adopted collage as his primary medium. Albers taught his students to preconceive their work, and introduced the idea of having visual or verbal justification for what they did. He challenged ideas of pure abstraction by thinking of “evocative color” and “evocative form.” After graduating, Rubin pushed his collage practice into three-dimensions, first by incorporating cardboard relief, and then by cutting, painting and assembling wood. The constructions became both structures atop which Rubin conducts planar explorations of color harmony and optical phenomenon, but also containers for collecting and celebrating a wide range of art historical references.

He was known as a teacher. In fact, he was your teacher. What did you take away from his class?Wonder and joy, a destabilization of what I had assumed to be the truth, an appreciation of color as a readymade material and a subject, a commitment to craft, an intergenerational and posthumous connection to artists of the past, an endorsement for picking things up out of the trash. I was really lucky to study with Rubin in the final year he taught his foundation color class at Cooper Union. We spent the entire first semester working with Color-Aid paper, influenced by the magic show that is Interaction of Color, the second semester devoted to “free studies” using found paper and mixed media. We did all of the cutting and pasting at home, and the entire four-hour studio was devoted to critiquing and discussing our color compositions in all their successes and failures. I would not be the artist and teacher I am today without Irwin Rubin.

You obviously feel Rubin’s work has relevance today. Rubin’s constructions and collages come across as remarkably fresh today, and it’s been wonderful to see artists from across generations connecting with them at SVA. Ben DuVall’s HTML/CSS Painting (after Rubin), 2024, a web-based painting created especially for the exhibition, is just one example of how Rubin’s work relates to contemporary practices. But what I find most relevant is to look beyond Rubin’s individual artworks, to look at his broader creative life that included teaching and collecting, and remember that artists might not always fit in with their time or do what is expected of them, and that’s great. Polychrome, meaning not just multi-colored but referring specifically to architectural elements and sculpture decorated in multiple colors, is an ancient practice that has at times been dismissed, overlooked or forgotten. Framing Rubin’s painted wood constructions as polychrome takes them outside of linear narratives, where they can be the ancient predecessor to their Modernist counterparts, and live outside of conventions like yesterday and today.

Steven Heller has written for PRINT since the 1980s. He is co-chair of SVA MFA Designer as Entrepreneur. The author, co-author and editor of over 200 books on design and popular culture, Heller is also the recipient of the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award for "Design Mind," the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement and other honors. He was a senior art director at The New York Times for 33 years and a writer of obituaries and book review columnist for the newspaper, as well. His memoir, Growing Up Underground (Princeton Architectural Press) was published in 2022. Some of his recent essays are collected in For the Love of Design (Allworth Press).