to where the gesture flees

A vast scattering of oilsticks, rough-hewn wood and brushes. Shoeboxes filled with photographs and stacked without any clear method line the varied shelves and workbenches. Negatives of photographs, too, lie in waiting like fraternal shadows. An old rotary phone, with all the dark romanticism of the unnecessary and forlorn, sits screwed into the east wall. Staples. Triangles. Crisp yellow news-papers still ringing with the urgency which must have beckoned them to where they are now pressed into the floor. Pencils. In a swatch of the pale and quavering morning light that has forded the room to climb up one of the preparatory tables, a razor blade and a spoon. 

These are only a few of the things one takes in upon entering the studio of the artist Harvey Breverman, and they are at once exhilarating and exhausting. Breverman, a professor of art at the University at Buffalo, is in his own right a world-renowned artist, and a simple visit to his studio makes this apparent. There are walls and crawlspaces and smaller adjoining rooms that house canvas upon canvas of stored works, many of which are in the permanent collections of galleries as close as the Albright-Knox, as conspicuous as the MoMA, and as far-reaching as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. To date, Breverman has had over 80 solo exhibits and innumerable group showings. His work has been aligned with the works of Homer, Sloan, and Hopper; he has been acclaimed critically for his “energetic, almost obsessive, exploration of the mysteries of the human condition,” and he is deemed one of the premiere talents of narrative art working in the country today. 

In plainclothes, Breverman looks like any other college professor–a little haggard, a little too thin. Yet when dressed in his work togs (Breverman estimates working eight to 14 hours in the studio a day), one gets the sense that there is a great well of vitality brimming just beneath the flannel button-up and the paint-and-charcoal encrusted canvas pants. Even the boots he wears–twin puddles of leather bound up by electrical tape and acquired in Holland in 1965–seem prepared to make great leaps were the command to be made. In fact, standing in front of his works in progress, explaining them in his thoughtful if not fractious manner, Breverman looks not unlike the solitary woodsman receiving a long-awaited guest, eager to interpret for you the topography of the landscape in which he lives and hunts. 

And there is much more to see here. Nails and tacks, scraps of paper, shreds of pictures torn from magazines. A lone garden glove clinging to the wainscotting. An alcove with pegs and shelves crammed with enough tools to make one wonder if carpentry is not, in fact, the source of his income. Even the ceiling is in disarray, the beds of silver insulation exposed unabashedly, as if to question why they were left unfinished would somehow, looking around at the imperative mess that is the artist’s studio, be a sin. What is being witnessed is a life-work in the midst of its creation. 

There is a near palpable quality to the air. You can almost sense all the hours, all the framing (Breverman constructs his own frames and frames his own works), all the gathering of material, all the ritual and preparation, all the time spent searching for the essential piece of charcoal that has rolled beneath a vagary of papers, all the vigor of the work being done, all the uncelebrated quiets that occur between. 

A tour of the studio begins with Breverman offering brief glimpses of his notebooks, which for all the various sketches and drawings whose subjects span from bus drivers to famous historians, from country to country, seem forever to be with him. The notebooks are inspiring in themselves. And not simply in terms of art, not the joy brought forth by art-for-art’s-sake, but for the life they capture, the life previously undisclosed. 

Not necessarily for their dramas either. Many of the Breverman’s drawings are of people’s backs. “I’m drawn to that detachment,” Breverman says. He remembers being moved by the times he spent in line while in the army, sometimes waiting for nothing. “Long, interminable lines, just staring at someone’s back,” Breverman recalls. “We pray behind other people. And one day that struck me as totally bizarre. Standing behind other people praying who are behind other people praying.” It is not, therefore, the flagrant pose or the visceral act that Breverman tends to in his work. “There is a movement, perhaps there is a gesture, yet you can’t see everything, and there’s a mystery in that.” It is life glimpsed as through a lit window when outside all is dark. 

Breverman’s notebooks are equally occupied by architectural drawings of ornate metalworks and entire spanish villas, many of which seem to have been executed with the precision of an engineer; yet at the same time, one can almost feel the smallest stirrings of the breeze that came off the paper when the last flourish was made. These drawings, while without the complexities which arise in the human studies, are in many ways even more breathtaking, if simply for their likeness not only to the place they depict, but to the time, the season and the day, the weather even, in which they were conceived. 

Although he has had success working–and continues to work–in printmaking, painting, and etching, drawing is the medium Breverman admittedly prefers. “I’m very interested in how an abstraction in one’s head, or heart, or stomach, reveals itself. And unfolds. And in drawing it’s usually unadorned and succinct. But it also reveals revisions and transformations one makes–intelligible, unintelligible–that have the kernel of an idea.” 

“I think drawing’s been maligned over the years,” Breverman says gravely. And then, with a smile that is both shy and sly, “But it’s going through a resurgence now. A lot of artists are beginning to show drawings.” 

In terms of style, Breverman is revered as a realist, although he claims in his graduate school years he had to wade through a period of abstraction. When asked for what reasons he abandoned abstraction, Breverman replies,“I gave up well-articulated abstractions in favor of content. Abstraction wasn’t enough. It seemed too far detached.” 

He now finds the human figure to be absolutely central to his work. “Suddenly I realized that it might be possible for life and art to merge. I still use formal abstract organizational systems, but I always couch them in the larger context of ‘is there a significant idea, a challenge? Are there humanistic values and concerns?’ Yes, in my work the human figure is essential.” 

In contrast to his drawing, (for which, along with his printmaking, he is perhaps best known), Breverman has produced a series of large paintings of figures who seem to be interacting or not, often engaged in what appear to be solitary tasks or thoughts. Breverman himself gives much weight to this idea of man-alone-among-others. “My work is driven by human interaction, and then human isolation, human frailty, discord, isolation, relations which exhibit a lack of relationship. People often inhabit the same space, yet only connect cosmetically.” 

Even the objects depicted seem to be incongruous with the figures. In the paintings there are artifacts from the artist’s studio, car pistons and crude machineries, mirrors that warp the room behind. In a forward to a 1991 solo show at the Babcock Galleries in New York, curator Joseph I. Fradin attempts to decipher the seemingly paradoxical nature of the relationships depicted in Breverman’s work:

Each human figure exists in isolation, detached alike from environment and viewer, absorbed in some private meditation or ritual to which the viewer, at whom the figure rarely looks, has no access. The world of a Breverman painting seems to demand a scenario, a story that can be told. Yet no such narrative, no fiction that might lead to truth, seems possible. Human motive and the causes of action and response remain mysteries; nothing in the environment or in the figures will fully reveal them to our understanding. To question is to learn how much we cannot know. 

In his own esteem, as his contemporaries Breverman names Lucien Freud, Edwin Dickinson (“because of the mysterious, atmospheric, and visionary characteristics of his work”), Ivan Albright, and the American expatriate R.B. Kitaj. In Kitaj he finds the similar approach of “bringing together disjunctive parts that don’t ordinarily fit. And in those connections or disconnections, creating thoughts that are very problematic, that raise questions more than answer them.” 

Raising questions is indeed crucial to Breverman’s work. In his most recent series, “Nightworks,” which was displayed last year at the SUNY Albany Chancellor’s Gallery and has been Breverman’s central work for the past decade, Breverman creates representational portraiture of oftentimes famous writers and artists he’s drawn from life (Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few), which appear to be engulfed by the backgrounds from which they are struggling to emerge. The texture of each surface has a layered quality, looking almost as if it had been stricken by a flurry of scratches and then desperately mended again, giving the works an immediate feeling of unrest. And then there is the inexplicable presence of ancient Hebraic text, disembodied and floating above them, almost more akin to portents than blessings. In a portrait of Raymond Federman, the living poet appears to be dead, laid out on an unseen pallet, with the Hebrew prayers (the characters of which are represented by various animals in a myriad of poses and angles), bearing low upon him. Robert Duncan’s face is submerged in a swirl of monstrous drawings and incomplete notations which Breverman extracted from Duncan’s own journals. 

There is a darkness to this series which is undeniable, and that quality of foreboding adds even more power to the disparate elements the paintings portray, and to the paradoxes they perpetuate. The paintings seem caught somewhere between invite and omen, the faces that look out not quite smiling, not quite sneering. They offer question, scrutiny. They ask one to look again, and closer. And still there is no final answer, there are no words that can be given to name it. In a way it would be like trying to glean something from a great mountain boulder that has been displaced to your urban lawn. Or a wind that has passed through the sealed room in which you slept. Like Fradin said in his 1991 introduction, these paintings teach us what we cannot know. For what answer, what unalterable history, will you get from that mute and impregnable stone? By what name will you call that wind? 

Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Harvey Breverman went on to Carnegie-Mellon University to receive his BFA in 1956. From 1956 to 1958, Breverman served with Army Special Services in Korea, and in 1960 he earned an MFA from Ohio University. The following year he moved to Buffalo with his wife Deborah, a longtime teacher in the Amherst Central school district. The move was prompted by a position Breverman was offered at the University at Buffalo, and he has been teaching art there ever since. 

Though he has a good many acquaintances and colleagues in the art world, Breverman is not linked to any particular group, nor does he seem to want to be. The distance he keeps, however, is not out of scorn. The lens through which Breverman sees himself is very exact–he is as an artist–and what better commune is there to engage in for such an individual and intimate act than oneself? 

In 1999, Breverman was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor of Art by the State University of New York Board of Trustees. The promotion represents a rank above that of full professor, and is conferred on those who have achieved national or international prominence in their field. The selection criteria are rigorous and uncompromising, and the honor is the highest in the SUNY system. 

“It’s a designation that’s unique,” Breverman says. And then, with his head slightly canted into his lap, “It’s an honor that makes me very proud and humbled.” 

And it is clear Breverman enjoys his students as well. “These students are very challenging, very talented, and have great ideas. I’m excited when I can enter their world, and sit and listen and watch the things they’re doing.” 

As for advice to his young artists, Breverman is very direct. “Remember and study all those who have done it before you, and better. And if you’re willing to work and pursue it and spend enormous amounts of time and not compromise the work you're doing, then you make a few small breakthroughs every now and then.” He smiles. “Yes,” he says after a brief pause,“Some wondrous things can happen.” 

What force ultimately lies behind Breverman’s work? The answer is almost plaintive. Almost too simple for the complexity of his art. “A casual glance, a gesture, a twist, a twist of the back, the way a word is said. We run through our lives so quickly, and it’s all orchestrated, and then suddenly there are these casual moments that I look for and seek out.” And yet to hear him say it, the answer sounds completely appropriate. It is almost embarrassing, perhaps because, for Breverman, in that answer there is so much truth. 

In a forward to Breverman’s 1994 solo show at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, the American poet Robert Creeley gave a certain elegance to this idea: “Clearly his sense of the world is anchored in what he so deeply recognizes in his fellows, which is to say, their own seeing of themselves.” 

Breverman is not, however, without his quirks. His studio is not heated, and yet he loves the winter. “I like to have a slight feeling of discomfort when I’m working,” Breverman says plainly. Sometimes he forgets to eat. He never listens to music, even when he’s been working in total silence for 12 hours. “I’m listening to my own breathing,” he says. “I want to be attuned to all the nuances in the work and in my behavior.” 

In the first hour or two of the interview, Breverman is cordial and generous, yet as he moves around the studio there seems to be a wariness about him, a protective rigor to his movements that is almost monastic. But as the morning progresses and the conversation becomes more entrenched in his work, in art in general, one begins to see what may be a glimpse into the world of the artist-at-work. This is not to say Breverman becomes manic. Only that his cool and thoughtful demeanor has given way to a more robust effusion of his ideas, his wants, his beliefs. It’s as if suddenly, from the arms of passion which have gripped him for over four decades, we can see the veins. “People are not trained to see the margins of things,” Breverman says, a little louder now. “To see the peripheries. And that’s part of what is so intriguing to me.” 

Above the doorway a framed quotation has been nailed up and seems to have been there for a long time. It says, “It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which gives happiness.” And looking upon it, upon the peaked and gutted roof of the second floor studio, upon the artist himself, sitting on his old bowlegged stool, a little hunched in his posture, a litany of artists he finds to be great spinning from his lips, one cannot help but believe it. 

Still, with all Breverman’s apparent honors and success, it is somewhat unnerving that his presence among us is not as celebrated as perhaps it should be. Yet the anonymity Breverman enjoys is at least in part due to his own insulated lifestyle. Outside of the classroom, Breverman is most likely to be found working in his studio. Otherwise, Breverman and his wife Deborah frequently go on extended trips, sometimes locally, often to far reaches of the world, which are made in connection with grants and teaching stints (“There are no leisure trips.”) He is here, and yet he is not here. Would it be fair to say then, that it is a gesture made in life that is intended to reflect his art? That some parts can be revealed, but never the whole? It’s an interesting question, and yet to hear Breverman talk about his lifestyle, the answer is as disconcertingly simple as the one he gave so casually about the things which inspire him. “I never worried about a place in the sun,” he says flatly. In fact, the greatest compliment Breverman can imagine is, “That the guy knows something about drawing. That he loves to draw. That he’s obsessed with drawing.” 

On a tackboard leaning against one of the covered tables in the studio, partially obscured by brown packaging paper and other miscellanies, there is a clipping from a magazine. It is a small picture of a photograph, perhaps an advanced notice for an art show that appears to have come and gone some time ago. The photograph is by an artist named Dieter Appell, and in it a figure stands with his back to the camera, his face pressed very closely to the mirror before him. On the mirror a small fog has erupted to stain the glass. The work is entitled “The Mark on the Mirror Breathing Makes.” 

For some reason, it catches my eye, both upon initial entry and now upon departure. My mind seems to want to take hold of that image, to imagine a younger Breverman, perhaps living in collegiate squalor, sitting on the floor of his apartment in the winter, without any heat, of course, and being instantly struck by Appell’s photograph. So much so that he decides right then and there that he will become an artist. That he will devote his life to that idea. But as quickly as that thought comes it is gone. 

For that unknown reason, for that nameless reason we all strive for answers, for closure, I want the photograph to be a final explanation of Breverman’s work. I want it indeed to be that “kernel of an idea.” But such an idea cannot hold. I do believe, to some degree, Breverman’s work has a name in that photograph. It is that, but then of course, as with all great artists, it is more. 

in print discover issue one