Joan Altabe
An Art
Critic Who Creates Art
by Dan Koon

Most visitors to Fine Art Registry (fineartregistry.com) know Joan Altabe from her continuing series An Open Letter to Artists (from an Art Critic). Newspaper readers in Florida know her as the highly knowledgeable and opinionated art and architecture critic for the Bradenton Herald and before that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a staff position becoming increasingly rare as newspapers downsize in an effort to stave off their inevitable demise. After all, you can masquerade corporate press releases as “All The News That’s Fit to Print” only for so long before people turn to other sources for more valid information.
This is no rant against the media, though a drop of acid isn’t irrelevant when discussing Joan Altabe and her vocation as an art critic. In fact, it is good for a society to have the occasional person willing to point out that the glass is, indeed, half empty and, through the natural progression of things, may become half emptier if we don’t watch it.

Joan seems to have made it her calling to be such a voice in the cultural community of Florida’s west coast and, more widely, on various Internet sites in addition to Fine Art Registry. She states clearly what she likes and doesn’t like for all to read and they can like it or not; that’s her story and she’s sticking to it. However, anyone who concludes that here is someone substituting irascibility for intellect is making quite a mistake. Before she turned to art criticism, Joan taught art and knows whereof she speaks. Her 2004 book, Art Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Masters In and Out of Their Studios, ferrets out details about the leading lights through five centuries of Western Art that never seem to appear in your typical scholarly art history text. She’s done her digging and knows BS when she smells it.
Some people detest critics, thinking that criticism is merely faultfinding, a sort of counter-creation against another’s creation. And to be sure, a “critic” who only says, “I like it” or “I don’t like it” and can’t intelligently support his or her position is nothing more than an audience member in critic’s clothing. Yet, to ancient Greeks the word critic meant “skilled in judging,” and to exercise real judgment, there first has to be understanding and before even that, there has to be an ability to copy or duplicate. Perhaps then, one could listen to the pronouncements of a critic if they could demonstrate their understanding through an ability to perform in the field they were criticizing.
And that brings us to the focus of this profile, because Joan Altabe is an accomplished artist in her own right, and her art mirrors her art criticism in many respects. “I try to practice in paint what I preach in print,” is how she describes it.
Early Years and
Mentoring from a Legend
Joan’s lifelong affair with art began at age four with her grandfather who was an art teacher in the New York City school system. She attended New York’s famous High School of Music and Art which has produced a list of notables in music, dance, theater and film, photography and art (including the cartoonists who started Mad magazine).
She attended Hunter College in New York and studied under Robert Motherwell, one of the pillars of Abstract Expressionism, as much for his essays on the movement as for his paintings.
As for his influence on Joan and her art, she says, “[Abstract Expressionism is] not my -ism, but I learned how to compose from him. And something else. I’ll let him tell it: ‘The abstractness of modern art has to do with an effort to find a more adequate expression of subjective experience than what one sees in the street…’ You might say I apply his words to my non-abstract work. As a kid, I used to think that painting was recording ‘what one sees in the street.’ Motherwell taught me that painting needs to come from a personal place to be authentic.”
One other thing she seems to have borrowed from Motherwell, and even pushed further, was the predominance of black and white in his paintings. His most famous works comprise the long series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 110 abstract paintings, monumental in scale, similar in composition: two or three freely rendered black vertical bars separated by black ovoid shapes and accented by tiny patches of color. Joan’s paintings are non-abstract but entirely done in black and white.
Man and
Nature in
Black and White
Like her art criticism, Joan’s paintings are clearly rendered. When asked why she paints, she replies, “I can only tell you what I like to paint: the human form and skies. Light and shade playing on people, on clouds, likewise attract me. I work solely in black and white. I find color distracting, even irrelevant. And in a world overrun with color, the limited palette comes as a relief to me.”
Black and white, the colors of mourning and radiance, of life and death (here in the Occident, anyway). The restriction seems apt for her figurative paintings, a series entitled State of Mind. There’s nothing for the eye to deflect onto; you’re forced to confront the images – monumentally sized, extreme close-ups of the most revealing parts of a character: eyes, nose, mouth. Neither subject nor viewer has anyplace to go.
“Elimination of color and emphasis on light and shade allows greater focus on the subject,” she says. “I cover the gessoed surface of Masonite with Mars black and apply Titanium white to reveal the image. I liken the technique to lighting stage actors to illuminate the action. If necessary, I dim the light by adding more Mars black. Mars black is the best available black polymer. It looks like Ivory black, but it’s prepared
from the State of Mind Series
from fully permanent iron oxide. Titanium white is the most permanent white known.”
She uses the same technique for her Big Sky series, paintings of semi-real skyscapes. Here too, Joan pares everything back to what, for her, is the essence of the scene. The absence of color concentrates your focus on the shapes themselves. That and the light that illuminates them. Joan has spent many an hour marveling at the Florida sky and what the sun does to it, particularly near the end of a day.
“No artist can hold a candle to this daystar when it comes to painting the sky at dusk,” she wrote in The Best Painter Ever, Part 37 of her Fine Art Registry series. “Nothing in the long history of art can compare to the spiritual content of Old Sol’s elaborate, incandescent candlepower at twilight. Picture-making by this fireball eludes all known processes of painting.” [Read the entire article here.]
Asked for other influences, she replies, “My favorite painter is Lucien Freud. That man can paint! The amount of feeling he gets into a face can make the nerves hop. I also like April Gornik’s landscapes for their moving, storytelling skies.”
A
Third Series and Another Side of Black and White
Joan’s passion for black and white may have started with a lifelong involvement with cartoons. She has been cartooning since childhood and thinks that something her father did for her and her brother had something to do with it.
She explains, “He asked the popular cartoonists of the day – Ernie Bushmuller, who drew ‘Nancy,’ to send an original drawing with a personal message to me, and Carl Anderson, who drew ‘Lil Henry,’ to send an original drawing with a personal message to my brother. I loved the look of both these strips, their simplicity, the black outlines.”
“The High School of Music and Art actually took pains to dissuade me from cartooning,” she continues. “Part of the entrance exam for the school (a decidedly fine art place), included presentation of a portfolio of work I had done over a sustained period. Naturally, mine included cartoons. And I remember the interviewer saying to me something like, ‘If you’re accepted, we’ll get you out of this’ – indicating the cartoons. Sure enough, the school did just that. I didn’t cartoon for a long time afterward.”
Joan, the art historian then adds, with typical forthrightness backed by historical fact, “Which was ridiculous when you think of the painters who were cartoonists. Goya lampooned society in Spain,
Ring the bells that still
can ring/Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in
everything/That’s how the light gets in
--Leonard Cohen
True story: Joan Altabe looks up at the Florida sky. She takes it all in, the endless curve of the horizon, the sweep of color and movement. Her face lights up like a child’s. “Look at that,” she says, “it’s magnificent. Just remove the blue and you’re all set.” Remove the blue? It makes perfect sense in Altabe’s world. Altabe dreams in black and white; her paintings have the purity of a film noir flick. To Altabe, color’s a distraction – and she’s taken it out of the picture. She adds no hues to dilute the splendor of a cloud or a sad-eyed face. Altabe’s black and white world may be uncompromising – but it isn’t simply bleak. There’s the fright of eternity in that deep and demanding blackness, but when this pit of color is confronted by her thick insistence of white – illumination happens. Light burns through a churning swirl of darkening clouds; a slash of spectral highlights hinting of something. Did the storm happen – or is it just about to? Her canvas crackles with the frozen movement of limbs stretched in rigid embrace, bones in faces jutting from skin, eyes opening wide, clouds breaking, light pouring. And there’s sound: In her blacks, supreme silence; in her whites, a howl, a call, a whisper. A viewer explores the usual association chain: light, salvation, dawn, hope, reckoning. But Altabe’s paintings don’t come with an easy answer key. Her world contains harsh realms of inner association and outer landscapes of stark mystery. Don’t search for answers. Revel, instead, in the light that comes creeping through the cracks.
Florida writer Su Byron, on Joan Altabe’s art. Reprinted with permission of the author.
from the Big Sky Series
Daumier did it in France and Hogarth did it in England.”
After college, she worked as a muralist, but when a car accident prevented her from working, she began cartooning again for a newspaper on Long Island. She found that writing the gags interested her more than doing the drawings. This led to reviews of art books and eventually a staff job as art critic for a newspaper in Sarasota.
But she’s since returned to her old love, and the result is her Hardliner series, which are not gags so much as dramas played out on a single panel. Each portrays a skirmish in the battle of the sexes with “words that can whip like steel.” Looking at/reading them, you know that those words and worse are being said every day and, unlike Roy Liechtenstein’s cartoon panels, the viewers become immersed in the drama almost whether they like it or not.
Some artists have also been writers, but like Motherwell and Kandinsky, they wrote to express the philosophy underlying their work. Joan must belong to a very small club of art critics who can also create. In fact, she was particularly active from the 60s through the 80s showing her work, and was included in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum Tour, in addition to one-person and juried shows. But for some sentimentality on the part of Alaskans, the state flag today might have been Joan’s design.
“During the Bicentennial in 1976, the Santa Barbara Museum initiated a national competition that the Smithsonian Institution conducted – to redesign state flags,” she begins. “I chose Alaska. Because I lived in New York at the time, where so many artists live, my chances of winning seemed nil. But I tried anyway. The Alaska state flag needed redesign in my view. A jillion stars and whatnot made it unreadable. I imagined something simpler (this is where I think my cartoon appreciation comes in), with bold, unadorned shapes. So, I sketched out a horizon line in white and a white moon above with a midnight blue shade above the horizon and a slightly lighter blue below it – all to capture the pristine air of the place.
“There were 25 winners in all. Quite unexpectedly, I was the New York winner. The sketches were transformed into flags by the Betsy Ross Flag Company, and traveled museums nationwide, including NY’s Museum of Modern Art. Big thrill to take my kids, then little, to see Mom hanging, as it were, in the coveted halls of MOMA. Got a little write-up in the New York Times, too.
“The flags became the property of Santa Barbara Museum, which displayed them on poles on the approach to the building. Each winner got a copy of the flag. It hangs now in my daughter’s den. But, and this is the big ‘but,’ the governor of Alaska turned the flag design down and for a very understandable reason: a young teen who didn’t live very long had designed the existing flag and Alaskans were sentimental about it. (Sad to say, none of the states accepted flags that won the contest. But I’m rather fond of the reason mine was rejected).”
Joan has accumulated her share of awards for her art criticism and has hit a trifecta of sorts as well, being referenced in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who of American Women and Who’s Who in American Art.
Fine Art Registry™
and Future Plans
After Joan began writing her column for Fine Art Registry, Founder and CEO Teri Franks invited Joan to begin registering her work, and Joan sees the benefit that registration has for an artist. The record keeping function alone is a considerable advantage. Without Fine Art Registry, Joan says, there would be none as far as her own work goes. In fact, much of her historical track as an artist is found in her FAR® portfolio. For Joan, it is record keeping. But for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchild (yes, she is a great-grandmother and still kicking butt in the Florida art community) such a record is an important family connection.
Joan hasn’t done many shows since moving to Florida. “I’ve been reluctant because I’m a critic here and because the number of artists outnumber available walls,” she says. “I worry that I’m taking up room and worse, competing with them for collectors.”
She does show occasionally, most recently last March in a one-person show in Sarasota’s downtown library, and she was named Artist of the Month in October by Sarasota website AnythingArts.com.
As for doing major shows, Joan says, “My editor argued me into it, saying that I should let those I critique see what I do. Which is another way of saying, if you dish it out, you should take it, too.”
Surely this would be a rare event. An art critic who not only creates art but let’s others see it? If you don’t think this must take a certain amount of courage, can you imagine Clement Greenberg, noted critic and promoter of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, showing his work (had he done any)? Or Simon Cowell getting up there on American Idol and belting out a song?
For certain, some will like Joan’s work and some won’t. No one will be able to say, however, that it
isn’t coming from a definite, strong viewpoint or that
it isn’t sincere or that it doesn’t communicate! Joan’s art communicates all right. And as with her art criticism, it is a matter of: can you bear up to what is being said? ✍
[You can view Joan’s Fine Art Registry portfolio here or see more of her work and read commentary at her blog. You can obtain a copy of her book, Art Behind the Scenes: One Hundred Masters In and Out of Their Studios, here. And be advised, several similar books are in the works, the next, Sculpture Behind the Scenes, being released next summer.]
Joan’s winning design