Nathan Gluck

SOMETHING ELSE: The Collages of Nathan Gluck presents the first survey exhibition of collages created by Nathan Gluck, who is recognized as Andy Warhol’s pre-Pop commercial art assistant. Gluck and Warhol met through mutual friends in 1950 and were employed in the same world of design that fueled Warhol’s early reputation. In 1952, Gluck went to work for Warhol in the top-floor railroad flat on Lexington Avenue that the artist shared with his mother, Julia Warhola.  Over the next dozen years Gluck played an instrumental role in helping to shape and create many of Warhol’s most famous illustrations, ads and designs. He also assisted Warhol with his early transitional Pop pieces (1960-63), before Warhol established The Factory.

The collages on view span nearly 70 years, from the late 1930s through 2008. This exhibition provides an opportunity to consider the range and development of Nathan Gluck’s work, his contributions to the genre as well as to Warhol’s career and life. SOMETHING ELSE includes approximately 80 collages and mix-media works that show Gluck’s facility in integrating a number of different mediums and techniques with collage—from photogram, steel engraving, and gouache to watercolor, rubber stamps, and marbleized paper—and stylistic influences ranging from cubism, surrealism, and modernism to pop, word/text, and postmodernism. 

Gluck’s early works, created between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, reflect his deep appreciation of modern masters like Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Domenico de Chirico, and include experiments with narrative prose and original poetry.  His collages function as markers of his life and the 20th century and he often used them to memorialize important events. One collage combines cut-outs from a steel engraving depicting a Victorian woman with her back to the viewer and a mostly desolate landscape painted in gouache.  In the margins he has written a note to himself, and perhaps for posterity, that it was created during the radio broadcast announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Similarly, sixty years later he would commemorate the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in a collage dated September 12, 2001.  

The largest group of works represented in the exhibition were created between 1995 to 2008.  In these late works, which he began at the age of 77, Gluck was able to synthesize his many disparate interests into a single voice.  It is as if everything that he had ever collected over the years—all of his thoughts and ideas, competing influences and styles, tidbits of trivia and scraps of ephemera could no longer be contained and simply exploded in a remarkable output of creativity.  Here we see the finely-honed sensibility and confidence of the mature artist completely at ease with his skills and knowledge. 

In her review of his solo exhibition in 1997 at the Reinhold Brown Gallery in New York, Roberta Smith, chief art critic of The New York Times, wrote: “Composed of a staggering variety of printed ephemera collected by the artist and his friends and combining a range of printed detritus—matchbook covers, wine and shipping labels, ticket stubs, fruit stickers, club flyers, photos and newspaper ads, to name just a few—from around the world and the past several decades, these works play on words, forms, colors and,