{"id":2033729,"date":"2026-07-08T20:49:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2033729"},"modified":"2026-07-08T20:49:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T17:49:12","slug":"curator-ingrid-schaffner-talks-hauser-wirths-henry-taylor-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2033729","title":{"rendered":"Curator Ingrid Schaffner Talks Hauser & Wirth’s Henry Taylor Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TAYLHiv-HWZ-June-2026-view03-JE-hires.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tJames Jarvaise, the late California modernist (1924\u20142015), cuts a slick silhouette in Henry Taylor\u2019s vibrant impasto rendering of him. Jarvaise, wearing black shades, his shoulder-length hair combed back, sits slouched at the lower center of Taylor\u2019s glowing, yellow canvas. \u201cHe had swag,\u201d Taylor has said of his subject and first real art teacher, who encouraged him to enroll in art school and eventually embark on a path to become the luminous, lauded talent Taylor is today.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, in keeping with Taylor\u2019s long-held wish, that portrait he made of Jarvaise between 2015 and 2025, along with many more by both artists spanning seven decades, is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich until September 5, 2026. The exhibition, which traveled from Los Angeles, is titled \u201cJames Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked,\u201d in reference to advice Jarvaise once gave Taylor. It is also a poetically apt way into Taylor\u2019s soulful brushstrokes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cJarvaise saw something in me even before I saw it myself,\u201d Taylor has said of their relationship. In those early days in the 1980s, when Taylor began obsessively taking Jarvaise\u2019s classes at Oxnard Community College, he was far from imagining he\u2019d have a major solo show currently on view at the Mus\u00e9e Picasso in Paris. The same can be said of his acclaimed exhibition \u201cHenry Taylor: B Side,\u201d which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2023.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor his part, Jarvaise is not widely recognized today. Nevertheless, he showed his acclaimed \u201cHudson River Series\u201d of abstract paintings in the historic 1959 exhibition \u201cSixteen Americans\u201d at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, alongside the likes of Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. From the sounds of it, Jarvaise wasn\u2019t too concerned with the trappings of fame, much less fortune, and was instead passionately dedicated to his art practice and teaching in and around Los Angeles. His former students include Charles Arnoldi, David Novros, Peter Plagens, and Robert Therrien.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrought together as they are in this exhibition\u2014with their paintings hung salon style and unlabeled on the wall, sprinkled with a few of Taylor\u2019s sculptures\u2014new connections are revealed between their forms. ARTnews<\/em> sat down with the show\u2019s curator, Ingrid Schaffner, to talk about how the exhibition reveals Taylor\u2019s crucial use of landscape, deepening common, overly simplified readings of his practice as singularly focused on portraiture.<\/p>\n

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An installation view of \u201cSometimes a straight line has to be crooked\u201d at Hauser & Wirth Zurich. The show pairs Jarvaise\u2019s paintings with sculptures and landscapes by Taylor.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.<\/em><\/p>\n

ARTnews: How did this exhibition come together?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIngrid Schaffner: This exhibition is a promise fulfilled. Any time Henry Taylor is interviewed, often when he gives a public talk, he always mentions James Jarvaise, and generally\u2014well, always\u2014people say, \u201cWho?\u201d James Jarvaise was his teacher, and he was the first to see Henry\u2019s talent, and really his avocation to be an artist, even before Henry himself recognized that. So Taylor has carried this kind of sense of debt, of gratitude, to his teacher all these many decades. It was really his desire that this exhibition happen. He\u2019s wanted to make their work present to one another in public for many years.<\/p>\n

So this is all Henry\u2019s idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Henry joined the gallery, the gallery asked whether there was any dream project that he had. And Henry said, \u201cI want to do an exhibition for James Jarvaise.\u201d And that\u2019s why it was a promise he made to himself, fulfilled.<\/p>\n

Why was it important for Henry to have both their works shown side by side?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI think there are different ways to answer that, and one would be: Henry is celebrated, he has commercial success, he has critical success, and yes, Jarvaise exhibited in Southern California routinely, and he had a modest career, but his energy really was in teaching. So I think it\u2019s maybe almost like a mantle of success that Henry wants to share.<\/p>\n

\n\tJames Jarvaise was a California modernist, born in 1924 in the Midwest, served in the US Army, went to art school on the GI Bill, and is really the first generation of professional art teachers in America. He taught largely at the University of Southern California, but also at CalArts, Occidental, and other major schools in LA. The exhibition spans the 1950s until now\u2014really now\u2014but I don\u2019t think you feel it as a historic show. It\u2019s about making these two artists\u2019 works present to one another.<\/p>\n

And bringing some added recognition to his mentor\u2019s life practice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tRight. And being together. That\u2019s what I feel when I see how Henry completed that painting [described in the introduction, titled James Jarvaise, \u201cSometimes the \u2018straight\u2019 line has to be crooked,\u201d Santa Barbara<\/em>] in dialogue with Jarvaise: being together.<\/p>\n

\n\t[Beside Taylor\u2019s painting of Jarvaise] is The Man in the Room, a painting by James Jarvaise from a series that he made in the 1960s. [It depicts a dark silhouetted figure turned away from the viewer, placed roughly where Taylor has painted Jarvaise on his canvas. Both paintings have a suspended, geometric strip to one side of a mostly monochrome background or room.]<\/p>\n

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Henry Taylor, Room w\/a view or looks like the South to me, 2023.<\/span>Photo Nicholas Brasseur\/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

For a second, I doubted whether this portrait [which I later learned depicted Jarvaise] was Henry\u2019s work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, there\u2019s this nice back-and-forth, where you find yourself wondering \u2026 [Taylor] started this in 2014\u20142015 as a sketch, and it sat in the studio until we started working on this exhibition. Then he asked that he essentially be able to borrow this painting [by Jarvaise] and sort of paint to it, to bring this one to completion. Like if you have music in the studio.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn another salon-style wall, I had the studio in mind, so there\u2019s a lot of sketches and a sense of improvisation and beginnings. Everybody\u2019s mixed together, including a really early painting by Henry, from before 1988. But what\u2019s nice about this is that you feel kernels of what Henry\u2019s going to become: people, incidents, the flow of contemporary life.<\/p>\n

This was before Taylor enrolled in art school<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

\n\tAt that point, Henry was working at Camarillo State Mental Hospital as an orderly technician at night. And during the day, he took classes at Oxnard Community College. He took a little journalism, writing, anthropology, set design. And then he takes a painting class with Jarvaise. And he takes it over and over. Anything that Jarvaise teaches, Henry signs up for. To the point where, years go by, and finally Jarvaise says: \u201cHenry, you have to stop taking my class. You\u2019ve got to go to art school.\u201d Henry said, \u201cI never thought that art school was for me.\u201d And Jarvaise helps him put together a portfolio and apply to CalArts. Henry gets in, graduates with an MFA in 1995. He\u2019s in the same class as Mark Bradford, who also attended as an older student, and then Henry becomes the Henry we know.<\/p>\n

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James Jarvaise, Hudson River School Series (Segora Hills<\/em>), 1963.<\/span>Photo Nicholas Brasseur\/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Did Taylor continue working with Jarvaise once he started his MFA? What was he like as a teacher?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tHenry says that when he went to CalArts, he knew what he was getting into. CalArts is a very conceptual school, and he\u2019s making figurative painting in his studio, and every time it\u2019s crit time, the other students and professors just tell him to stop making figurative paintings. But he stayed the course, and he would put his paintings in his car and drive them to Oxnard Community College, and literally ambush Jarvaise as he was leaving work for a little lean-on-the-car crit. He said that what was so meaningful for him about these crits was that Jarvaise would look at the painting and tell him how to fix it, how to build it. Henry says it was like taking your car to the mechanic when it was making a pinging sound.<\/p>\n

\n\tJarvaise also told him to take his time, and if something\u2019s not working, just wipe it out. Don\u2019t be afraid to wipe out and start again.<\/p>\n

Did Taylor contribute to the selection of works and display?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tNot so much. It was really\u2014let\u2019s call it a desire. It\u2019s really an emotional thing for Henry. His sort of sense of allegiance to Jarvaise. Having the work together does bring that element of emotion into the exhibition.<\/p>\n

It also sounds like Jarvaise was very modest and could use people advocating for him more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, Henry said he never even knew about that 1959 MoMA exhibition, because Jarvaise never talked about himself with students. Henry said he just randomly looked up Jarvaise on his phone one day and found a copy of the catalog. I don\u2019t know if it was modesty. He was a very professional teacher, so it wasn\u2019t about himself. Also, it\u2019s not a story of someone overlooked by art history. [Jarvaise\u2019s] work is in museums. It has its history. But Jarvaise was a professional teacher\u2014that\u2019s how he earned a living. Exhibiting was almost something you did because you want the work to be seen by your community.<\/p>\n

In these works, we see Jarvaise paint figures, but also landscapes, which become almost distorted or nearly abstract.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s just say, we feel landscape here. He and Diebenkorn are the exact same age and moment. It\u2019s that moment\u2014like the Bay Area figurative painters\u2014you can feel something of the palette and the paint in there too. That\u2019s some of the contemporary context for this work. And again for context, James Jarvaise was part of the history-making \u201cSixteen Americans\u201d exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, curated by the great Dorothy Miller.<\/p>\n

Are some of the artworks shown in the 1959 exhibition included here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tOne work [Hudson River School Series (Segora Hills)<\/em>, 1963] is related to this body of work called the \u201cHudson River School paintings\u201d [in the 1959 show]. Jarvaise said: \u201cI\u2019m working abstractly, and I begin to feel just the colors and forms of California\u2019s landscape coming into my work, and I feel this sort of affinity for what the Hudson River School painters must have felt when this American landscape infiltrates their painting.\u201d That\u2019s the genesis of this body of work, and these all relate to that Hudson River School series of the late 1950s and early 1960s.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis horizon line that\u2019s running around this room through both of their works, this palette too, this really high-keyed color that\u2019s in Jarvaise\u2014[and] Taylor. These forms, or these masses that are part figurative, part abstract\u2014that\u2019s also how Jarvaise built his paintings.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the other thing I think is so interesting about this exhibition: It may be the first time we look at Henry and look past the people to landscape. But we also think about how he builds a painting, which he learned from Jarvaise.<\/p>\n

\n\t[The exhibition] is the revelation of landscape in the work of Henry Taylor. [Schaffner points to several large paintings by Taylor of people framed by steep green hills in natural and urban landscapes.]<\/p>\n

\n\tWe think of Henry and we think of people and we think of portraiture and we don\u2019t think of trees or landscape, but landscape is always there. And Henry says that\u2019s something Jarvaise always encouraged him to locate: to ground your figure. It is this California landscape that\u2019s rolling through both of their works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TAYLHiv-HWZ-June-2026-view03-JE-hires.jpg?w=1024″] James Jarvaise, the late California modernist (1924\u20142015), cuts a slick silhouette in Henry Taylor\u2019s vibrant impasto rendering of him. Jarvaise, wearing black shades, his shoulder-length hair combed back, sits slouched at the lower center of Taylor\u2019s glowing, yellow canvas. \u201cHe had swag,\u201d Taylor has said of his subject and first real art […]<\/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-2033729","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\/2033729","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=2033729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2033729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2033729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2033729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}