The History Painter

Alun Williams is a British-born painter with long ties living and working in New York, where he runs the Brooklyn gallery Parker’s Box as well as making paintings that surprise us as a postmodern, infinite jest on culture and the relations between literature and art. Fluent in French and married to a French painter, Williams decided to present his work by drawing pictures, literally and figuratively, of his influences. He has published Lest, a compendium of short historical essays written in English and put forth with a French translation directly following the writing in English. As it is also a monograph of Williams’s own art, there are many illustrations in which the shape of a paint mark—the artist’s signature image—takes position in what may be described, if such a category is possible, as postmodern history portraits, for example, of John Adams and Edgar Allan Poe. Williams has explained to this writer that he tried first to write in the first person, but felt uncomfortable with what he felt was the pretensions of the stance. So he decided to devote ten essays to people like Adams and Poe, in addition to other writers and public figures such as French novelist Jules Verne and Joseph Gaultier, a seventeenth-century astronomer.

Surely this is an idiosyncratic approach to writing a monograph! But Williams pulls it off by linking his considerable painting skills to an equally accomplished literary hand. His short essays are pithy and insightful; moreover, they exist within a framework that is humorous and quietly sardonic in a European, as opposed to an American, manner. But then the essays reflect the paintings and vice versa, with the paintings being relegated to the status of illustrations, a situation determined by the relatively small size of the volume. Really, Lest expresses itself as a compendium of historical and painterly insights that usually mirror the genre they are accompanied by. The contest is successful on both accounts; we trust the tone of Williams’s writing just as we trust the space of his paintings, inhabited as they are by both the abstraction of the paint stain and well-achieved figurative visuals of the real-world imagery in which the stain has been placed. As a result, the deeper question facing the reader has more to do with motives than with expression. Why would Williams want to work in this fashion, which is droll and dryly humorous? It is not a question that is easily answered, at least in part because the artist is so sly about his stories, literary and visual.

The word “lest” means avoiding the risk of something happening. It seems to me that what Williams wants to avoid has to do with misaligning himself as well as his readers. This misalignment might refer to the image that would have been projected, had the artist decided to go the traditional route and talk about himself. Really, the question facing him as a painter concerns the meaning of his profession, which some contemporary critics claim is more or less moribund. Williams would find it hard to continue working if he shared such an opinion, and as a way of avoiding the risk of being seen as egotistical, he has put himself—and us as readers—on the spot by inventing an evasive language in both essay and art. Why should he be writing about the people he has chosen? Why merge an unattractive paint mark with skillfully performed realistic description? The project of the book brings up many questions, and this is no small part of its charm. But the volume also might belong to the category of the hoax, in which nothing can be taken for granted. Such an ambiguous approach to culture shows us how Williams could quite literally muddy the ground of his paintings and still come away unchallenged; eager are we as an audience to accept whatever we see.

The written vignettes are just as ambiguous in their situations. The John Adams piece celebrates the American president in a brief piece of acute...