{"id":1906959,"date":"2026-04-27T16:32:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T13:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1906959"},"modified":"2026-04-27T16:32:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T13:32:28","slug":"archie-rand-on-painting-narrative-and-the-influence-of-philip-guston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1906959","title":{"rendered":"Archie Rand on Painting, Narrative, and the Influence of Philip Guston"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/0214_262304_Archie-Rand-Photo-Christopher-Garcia-Valle.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tHow do you know when a painting is finished? It\u2019s a question asked of so many painters, many of whom struggle to come up with an answer. When I posed it to Archie Rand during a conversation in his Brooklyn studio, he stood up from his lounge chair and walked toward an easel on which sat a half-finished work. In it, a dapper street vendor sells ceramics from a wooden board balanced on his head. Two children watch him from behind while, in one sliver of the background on the top left side of the picture, a blazing red sunset overruns the sky.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou know what the most important part of this painting is?\u201d he asked. \u201cThis, right here.\u201d He pointed to the top of left of the picture, where the building that serves as the painting\u2019s background meets the crimson sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A recently finished painting in Archie Rand\u2019s studio. Photo by Christopher Garcia Vale\/ARTnews.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tWhy? \u201cBecause I want to go around here and find out what\u2019s around the corner. Where are these people coming from? What\u2019s over there?\u201d He kept his finger on the canvas as he said it, tracing the edge of a building in the background of the picture. \u201cAnd I know I\u2019m pointing to a piece of cloth. But if I can say, \u2018What\u2019s over there,\u2019 then it\u2019s working. That\u2019s when I can put the brush down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe moved his hand toward the street vendor. \u201cThis guy,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s the least important part of the painting. But he has to be there. Otherwise none of the rest of it makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRand\u2019s studio in Clinton Hill, where he\u2019s lived and worked for more than two decades, is massive. At 50 feet wide and 100 feet long, and with 35-foot ceilings, it almost feels like a bunker. He even dug down six feet to install hydronic radiant heating, which allowed him to duplex the space. A deep row of purple primed canvases stands next to equally deep rows of finished works. On one end of the room are two small cozy sofas and a lounge chair. The furniture is flanked by hundreds of jazz and classical CDs in tidy, towering racks, along with stacks of books and magazines. On the other, a grand piano. (Rand was once the keyboard player in an early 1960s band called The Hassles. His replacement was Billy Joel.)<\/p>\n

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Archie Rand, at work in his studio. Photo by Christopher Garcia Vale\/ARTnews.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHis current show of new paintings at Jarvis Art, co-curated by Max Werner and Lindsay Jarvis, brings together works from a series called \u201cHeads.\u201d The paintings could be stills from the Technicolor imagination of a precocious child. A round, short haired boy practices the trumpet, his eyes shut tight and cheeks billowed, while seated in a feverishly pink and green floral lounge chair, one leg slung over its arm. In\u00a0Duck<\/em>\u00a0(2025), two children sail on a catboat, with a jaunty mallard as a figure head. The sea is rough, and despite the duck\u2019s smile, the boys are heading toward, or are already in, heavy weather. At the ship\u2019s bow, one of the two boys, grim-faced and flush, reaches out for something, or someone, out of our view.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike with all of Rand\u2019s work, Duck<\/em> takes place in media res. We\u2019ve been dropped into the middle of a story, <\/strong>and it\u2019s up to us to figure out how it ends. <\/p>\n

\n\tWerner knew Rand\u2019s work for years before putting the show together. The son of dealers Mary Boone and Michael Werner, Max was 8 years old, playing in Malcom Morley\u2019s studio, the first time he met Rand. They saw each other there often. Then, in 2021, they reconnected at an opening at the Lower East Side gallery Totah. \u201cHe\u2019s ahead of his time and somehow still in it,\u201d Werner told me. \u201cYou can look at the early work, and look at the work he\u2019s doing now. It looks nothing alike, but it\u2019s just so clearly by the same guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPeople find the pictures refreshing, said Werner, which isn\u2019t surprising given how cross-pollinated the art world has become. \u201cThere\u2019s 18 Peter Doigs and 18 Cecily Brown\u2019s and 200 riffs on Frankenthaler. Archie\u2019s not riffing. He moves according to his own path, and he\u2019s kind of agnostic to the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLindsay Jarvis agreed. \u201cArchie\u2019s visual language is truly singular and idiosyncratic at a time when everything is so derivative,\u201d he said. The best part, he continued, is placing work with young clients who weren\u2019t around when Rand was exhibiting in the \u201980s at storied galleries such like Tibor de Nagy and Phyllis Kind. \u201cThey\u2019re experiencing something wholly new.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Archie Rand, Duck<\/em> (2025). Photo by Deidre Higgins. Courtesy Jarvis Art, New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBorn in Brooklyn in 1949, he studied first at the Art Students League, then at Pratt, where he took courses in cinegraphics. He was pulled toward storytelling early on, mainly though picture and comic books, and he started showing in commercial galleries when he was just 17. Clement Greenberg saw the work, which in the early days leaned toward Abstract Expressionism, and took a shine to the young painter. \u201cHe\u2019d pat me on the head and hug me because I got what he was trying to say about art,\u201d Rand recalled. But Rand realized that he did want to be wedged in to an aesthetic that was already running its course.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1970 he had an epiphany in the form of red-hued canvases populated by thuggish cartoon figures in white pointed hoods.\u00a0At Marlborough Gallery, Philip Guston had shed his Abstract Expressionist skin and reintroduced himself to the art world through figurative paintings of thuggish, cigar smoking Klansmen. The show polarized the New York art world, but it found supporters in Rand and his friend, the poet and critic Ross Feld, who on that first visit sat on the gallery floor, going back and forth over what they were looking at.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFeld wrote about it kindly, even while other critics did not; Guston read the piece and asked to meet him. Feld told him he wasn\u2019t coming alone. \u201cYou have to invite Archie,\u201d he said. \u201cHe told me what to write.\u201d They went to Guston\u2019s bolthole upstate and talked for three days. Rand was in his mid-20s. When he thinks back, he remembers the pace of it\u2014the references, the way Guston moved through them, the sense that the painting was something you entered and stayed inside, following it forward.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Rand, it\u2019s almost as if their connection had been prophesied: when he first went to Guston\u2019s studio, he saw a postcard of a Pontormo fresco pinned to the wall. For years, he\u2019d had same image he had over his own bed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A framed letter from Philip Guston to Archie Rand.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tLike Guston, Rand is a prodigious reader. He\u2019s gifted with the kind of memory that, at various points during our conversations, allowed him recite lines from an Allen Ginsberg poem, a Simone Weil exploration of the\u00a0limits of language, and an Oscar Wilde quote. \u201cI can\u2019t help it, I talk this way,\u201d Rand said. \u201cI\u2019m Jewish, what can you say? We are a digressive people. It\u2019s very Talmudic way of thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI asked how he felt about not fitting neatly into any current category of contemporary art, and he brought up a letter Einstein wrote to Niels Bohr that Rand read in high school. Bohr asks the theoretical physicist\u00a0 to explain how he came up with the theory of relativity. \u201cThe answer blew me away,\u201d Rand says, \u201cand it\u2019s so very Jewish. He said: \u2018I simply chose to ignore an axiom.\u2019 That\u2019s with me still today. He figured, well, let me see what happens if I just ignore everything. And let\u2019s be honest, this isn\u2019t Cubism. I\u2019m not inventing anything. I\u2019m just doing what I have to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTeaching has been a constant through his career. At Columbia, he chaired the visual arts department and worked closely with students, including Dana Schutz. He is now Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College. His modus operandi?\u00a0<\/em>One or two paintings with grid system so they can paint like Vermeer, he says, then they are on their own. \u201cI don\u2019t critique. I don\u2019t talk about aesthetics. I just watch,\u201d he said. \u201cIt drives them crazy. But at the end of the semester, every one of them becomes a painter, and they are all different. It\u2019s beautiful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAt 77, Rand is still working every day, often with Johannes Brahms or Eric Dolphy pulsing through the studio. \u201cOne of two things is going to happen when I die,\u201d he said. \u201cEither somebody is going to think, \u2018I should make an effort to actually maintain the work of Archie Rand, so the world can see his genius,\u2019 or the next day, the sanitation department will come and throw everything in the dumpster. That\u2019s not my problem. My problem is not to ensure my future or gain posthumous fame. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve accepted that and I\u2019m happy with my life,\u201d he continued. \u201cI\u2019ve done what I had to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/0214_262304_Archie-Rand-Photo-Christopher-Garcia-Valle.jpg?w=1024″] How do you know when a painting is finished? It\u2019s a question asked of so many painters, many of whom struggle to come up with an answer. When I posed it to Archie Rand during a conversation in his Brooklyn studio, he stood up from his lounge chair and walked toward an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1906959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1906959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1906959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1906959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1906959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}