Nathan Gluck

By Jody Zellen

Gluck amassed a vast body of work, (making collages for over 70 years) and on view at Luis de Jesus Gallery are a selection borrowed from his estate and created in the 1930s and 1940s. These elegant, small scale works were influenced by Surrealism and share a kinship with other artists making collages at this time including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Hanna Hoch, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. The exhibit also includes vitrines with books, documents and ephemera that showcase many of these influences.

By Jessica Gelt and Ashley Lee

Three exhibitions Desire is at the center of Laura Krifka’s figurative oil paintings in “Carousel”; Canadian painter Tristram Lansdowne explores the use of representational space through water colors with “Burrito Planet”; and, marking the centennial of surrealism, “Unlocking the Mind: Early Surrealist Collages” focuses on Nathan Gluck’s World War II-era work.

“Unlocking the Mind: Nathan Gluck’s Early Surrealist Collages” brings together a selection of early career artworks by Nathan Gluck (1918-2008) spanning approximately ten years, from the late 1930s through the late 1940s. The works on view reflect the young artists deep appreciation of modern surrealist masters like Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Domenico de Chirico, and include experiments with narrative prose and original poetry. 

The gallery’s fall season starts off with three coinciding exhibitions: Laura Krifka Carousel, Tristram Lansdowne Burrito Planet, and Nathan Gluck Unlocking the Mind: Nathan Gluck’s Early Surrealist Collages. Krifka uses figuration to reflect upon our desires derived from human constructions. Lansdowne takes to watercolors to explore shifting genres. Gluck’s show looks at his career throughout the 1930s and 40s and the influence of the surrealist movement on his collages.

Next door, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has two fantastic collage-centric solo shows on view until July 28th. Dennis Koch: Beyond the Funny Farm! Crypto-K, Cutouts, Cut-ups, Copies, Mirrors, Membranes, and Temporal Algorithms comprises sculptures and works on paper inspired by dizzying literary theory alongside modified LIFE magazines. The artist has incised into the publications, creating compositions that play off of the cover story and the images from advertisements within. My personal favorite is “Sex Kitten” Ann Margret, hair wild, surrounded by a chorus of televisions.It’s the show in the front room, however, that I found myself thinking about days after seeing. SOMETHING  ELSE: The Collages of Nathan Gluck is a survey of the late artist’s small works on paper that spans from the 1930s to the 2000s. Gallerist Luis De Jesus was a close friend of Gluck, who himself worked as a window dresser and assistant to Andy Warhol (among many other adventures). De Jesus lovingly organized this tribute with a personal eye to the artist’s singular wit and personality, sorting through a treasure trove of material in Gluck’s estate.

If Gluck is known at all, it’s as the man who assisted Andy Warhol in his commercial-art business for about a dozen years, ending in 1966. That standard view of Gluck as playing second fiddle to Warhol isn’t quite wrong, but it  gives a false impression of how things stood when they first met, around 1951. At that moment, Gluck, a decade Warhol’s senior, was clearly the more sophisticated, mature, and art-educated of the two. He made this photogram, for instance, exactly ten years before Warhol’s tried his hand at the same medium, while still in art school. This and the other early collages at Luis De Jesus show that Gluck was fully clued-in to the latest in European Surrealism at a moment when Warhol was still literally in short pants.

A pair of exhibits at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles demonstrates two distinctly different approaches to the manipulation of paper in the service of cultural commentary. "SOMETHING ELSE: The Collages of Nathan Gluck" celebrates the centennial of the late artist's birth. Mr. Gluck is primairly recognized as Andy Warhol's early commercial art assistant. But the show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents an overdue retrospective of Mr. Gluck's own versatility and skill with collage, but also the wide-ranging possibilities of art form in general. Works on displayinclude photogram, steel engraving, gouache, watercolor, rubberstamps, and marbalized paper and exhibit stylistic influences of the decade in which they were created, such as cubism, surrealism, modernism, pop, word/ text, and postmodernism. 

Although many artists and non-artists alike engage with the process of collaging, a successful collage is not that easy to achieve. For the merger of unrelated images and/or texts to resonate beyond the obvious, there is much to take into consideration— point of view, message, cohesion of elements, formal arrangement, etc. Juxtaposing disparate elements from various sources does not necessarily construe art. Collage has a broad history and those who venture into collaging must take into consideration their historical precedents.

Something Else represents the first survey exhibition of collages created by Nathan Gluck, who is recognized as Andy Warhol’s pre-pop commercial art assistant. Gluck helped shape and create many of Warhol’s most famous illustrations, ads and designs. He also assisted Warhol with his early transitional pop pieces. The collages on view span nearly 70 years, from the late 1930s through 2008. Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is located at 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. For information, visit luisdejesus.com.

I talk with my friend Nathan Gluck about Andy Paperbag...oops, I mean Andy Warhol, blown fuses, John Cage window displays, grocery shopping for items that will change the cultural landscape forever, Lucille Ball's strange choice of protégés, Factory phonies, Greta Garbo's garbage, the origin of muttonchops, Amy Vanderbilt and Jackie O. wannabes, the strange disappearance of Op-Artist Bridget Riley, who wants a "fun" baby, Ben Day dots, and casually loaning items to friends only to have them end up locked away under glass in a museum 20 years later.

“It's hard for me to separate Nathan, the person, from the Nathan, the artist—the two were inextricably bound,” says Luis De Jesus, director of Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, who was Nathan's best friend and was with him when he died.Anyone who knew him personally can see his quirky, yet elegant sense of style, sharp wit, all-encompassing knowledge, refined appreciation of the classics and, above all, his oddball sense of humor reflected throughout his work.

Everthing in thse small compositions reveals a sharp eye for design. Coupled with an easygoing and persuasive artistic vision. "Slibowitz Serenade" typifies his talent, with its wry arrangeent of a liquor label that gives the work its title, floating against a fragment of a musical score punctuated by stars, a fragment of a sculpture, some images of butterflies and a Greco-Roman figure in profile. Gluck's collages are thick with references to Europe. "Opera/Theater" is filled with ticket stubs from operas and concerts amassed in varied continental venues. 

Almost everything we've seen of Nathan's was done on a small scale. They are colorful and deft and effortless, as if he knocked them out in the evening after finishing other tasks. He was immensely prolific and generous with his work -- it sometimes seemed that no sooner did he finish a drawing than he put it in the mail and sent it off. There's a drawing he sent to Gina's parents in 1950 of a girl carrying a bunch of balloons.

Nathan Gluck, who was born in 1918, got a job working for Andy Warhol in 1955 and stayed with him, on and off, for much of the 60s. He was his 'studio assistant,' a fact which reveals that, at a fairly early stage, Warhol's enterprises were well developed. Yes, for Andy,  job in New York was indeed success. Warhol's operation was commercial, rubbing shoulders with advertising agencies, photographic studios and the design departments of leading department stores (most notably Bonwit Teller and Tiffany). From the 'real' world of art, its magnificoes and dealers, he was somewhat distanced and in awe. 

In the 1950s, when Andy Warhol was a sought-after commercial artist, Nathan Gluck was his assistant, making drawings and designing layouts that are cherished today as signs of Warhol's hybrid genius. After Warhol turned to fine art, Mr. Gluck pursued his own successful career as an illustrator and graphic designer, and in retirement, he is concentrating his energies on small, beautifully composed collages, 85 of which form this impressive show. Combining a range of printed detritus -- matchbook covers, wine labels, ticket stubs -- from around the world and the past several decades, these works play on words, forms, colors (often Warholesque fluourescents) and, above all, on styles.