Felrath Hines and the Color Predicate

Editor’s note: Professor Floyd Coleman passed away during the production of this issue. It was a privilege to have him contribute to Callaloo • Art, through both his writing and his selection of artists and images. His accomplishments as an artist, art critic, and art historian will be featured in the 2018 issue of Callaloo • Art.

Felrath Hines revealed his ideas and attitudes toward art, life, the world, and his place in it through paintings that date from the 1940s until his death in 1993. Throughout their many manifestations, his works are embodiments of his inner world of thoughts and feelings, which involve an existential search for identity, all shaping his aesthetic philosophy and artistic praxis. As a person born in the early years of the twentieth century, he lived and experienced times of abrupt change, uncertainty, conflict, and insecurity—a circumstance that has been variously called “the modern condition.”

As an artist, Felrath Hines privileged the intimacy of the creative imagination over a concern for mimesis. For Hines the issue of verisimilitude gives way to an interpretive-analytical vision presented in semi-abstract and completely abstract (non-representational) iterations. The creative production of this artist is shaped by his imagination; its transformative powers and energy provide a means through which artistic concepts, ideology, values, and sensibilities are realized. Hines saw representational art as mimicry, easy and not exerting demands on the artist’s creative imagination. In this light, he privileged abstraction, which places demands on the artist to invent something that challenges the viewer in order for the experience of art to be truly significant and meaningful.

Reductionist simplification is characteristic of Hines’s early figurative work. He is simplifying shapes until they become abstracted forms in space, and musical references (like jazz) helped him break away from strict, modest, incipient modeling, creating spatial articulation indebted to early-twentieth-century aspects of abstraction. Here, color—light and relative dark and tertiary hues––is used to define the visual field with shapes that appear in proximate space. Hines’s penchant for articulated, structured form and space can be seen in semi-abstract figurative works that draw upon historical sources, such as the visual qualities of medieval stain-glass windows, or the reductionist human configurations of his teacher Nahum Tschacbasov (1899–1989) and artist Ferdinand Leger (1881–1964). Works that Hines completed during this time feature imagery within the pictorial space that has been sufficiently modified to satisfy his desire to achieve affecting, transformative imagery, but which also allows some viewers confirmation associated with recognizable subject matter.

In his landscape-sourced abstract paintings, the space is unified by color, tying the composition together with both similar and oppositional constructs. Hines is acutely aware of how the viewer responds to shapes and forms in space, particularly their orientation as defined by the dominant axis. He creates a sense of balance with discordant forms, as well as overlapping forms, creating a tangential presence within the pictorial space, as in Untitled (c. 1985).

In his late paintings, Hines was trying to eliminate all vestiges of the vagaries associated with imitation and naturalism, and sought to emphasize flatness of the visual field, amplifying the flatness of the stretched canvas itself. He was also concerned about implicit movement, frequently from side to side, rather than from front to back, achieved with geometric abstraction. In such works Hines follows guiding concepts of autonomy and completeness, self-referent qualities that are aligned with dominant mid-twentieth-century aesthetic conceits. In this last phase of his career, Hines continued to explore themes and formal qualities with color combinations indebted to the early-twentieth-century precisionists’ language, but featured a wide range of high-key colors, both warm and cool, mediated by neutrals to create a spatial dynamic, yet also provide a sense of completeness.

His was a spatial identity achieved through an uncommon and most extensive understanding and use of color. In this regard, he was inspired by the work of artists of his generation, as well as those who preceded him, such as Josef Albers (1888...