Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Donald Baechler was never the artist you thought he was. For decades, you pigeonholed him into the convenient box of “1980s neo-expressionism”, alongside Basquiat and Haring, as if this New York triumvirate shared the same artistic preoccupations. What a monumental error! Baechler himself repeated to anyone who would listen: “I am an abstract artist above all”. And yet, we continued to see in his flowers, his round heads, and his childish silhouettes an falsely naive aesthetic, while he patiently built a work obsessed with line, form, and balance.
Baechler’s work, who passed away in 2022, demands to be reevaluated on its own terms. His large paintings with thick black lines, placed on worked backgrounds like contemporary superimpositions, transcend the simplistic interpretations that saw in them a recovery of childish art. What I like about Baechler is his ability to walk a tightrope, as Robert Pincus-Witten so aptly put it, “between the banana peel of evidence and that of obscurity” [1]. One step too far, and the work tips into comic bathos. But Baechler, like a seasoned tightrope walker, always stops just short of the fall.
To understand Baechler, one must first grasp his relationship with art history, not the one usually attributed to him (the filiation with outsider art), but the one he himself claimed. When asked about his major influences, he cited without hesitation Cy Twombly, Giotto, and Rauschenberg. Nothing less! This trinity reveals everything about his artistic project: the primordial line and the richness of surfaces in Twombly, the monumental narrative and formal clarity in Giotto, the collage technique and the juxtaposition of disparate images in Rauschenberg.
Baechler’s approach to painting is part of an American tradition that can be traced back to Robert Motherwell, a major figure of abstract expressionism and a leading theorist of modern art. This lineage is particularly visible in the way Baechler manipulates the tensions between simplicity and complexity, between apparent spontaneity and meticulous deliberation. Like Motherwell, Baechler was an intellectual disguised as an intuitive painter, a scholar who hid his vast culture behind forms of deceptive immediacy. Motherwell wrote that “the central problem of modern painting is to discover what feelings the modern structure contains”, and that is exactly what Baechler explored in his work [2]. Baechler’s relationship with Motherwell revolves around this common quest: finding a balance between personal expression and the formal requirements of painting. In his complex collages and seemingly banal images, Baechler invokes the spirit of Motherwell who sought to transform the private act of creation into a public experience. Like his predecessor, he manipulates archetypal forms (the flower, the head, the globe) to infuse them with an emotional resonance that transcends their apparent simplicity. His use of highly textured surfaces echoes Motherwell’s interest in the material qualities of painting, what he called “the very substance” of art. When Baechler builds his complex backgrounds, accumulations of fabrics, papers, and layers of paint, he continues Motherwell’s tradition, who considered the canvas a battlefield where materiality and concept clash. Both artists also shared a fascination with the creative process itself, with the possibilities and constraints inherent in the materials used. Baechler liked to build accidentally textured surfaces precisely so that his line could not follow too fluid a path, he sought what he called an “integrated fracture”, a material resistance to the pictorial gesture. This approach echoes Motherwell’s remark that “painting is a series of decisions made in a state of intense tension”. For both artists, authenticity emerges not from unbridled expression, but from a constant dialogue with formal and material constraints. If Motherwell explored the expressive possibilities of pure abstraction, Baechler navigated the border between figuration and abstraction, using recognizable images as pretexts for formal explorations. His way of isolating simple forms against complex backgrounds recalls Motherwell’s “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”, where monumental black forms stand out against backgrounds animated by subtle chromatic variations. This figure-ground relationship, central to the work of both artists, becomes in Baechler the theme of a permanent tension between recognition and strangeness, between familiarity and alienation.
Parallel to this lineage with Motherwell, Donald Baechler’s work engages in a fascinating dialogue with the tradition of the theater of the absurd, particularly with the plays of Samuel Beckett. This connection may seem surprising, but it sheds striking light on Baechler’s artistic journey. His simplified characters, his rootless flowers, and his floating objects evoke the Beckettian universe populated by figures isolated in indeterminate spaces. In “Waiting for Godot”, Beckett reduces human existence to its most elementary essence, two tramps waiting for someone who will never come, in a landscape defined solely by a leafless tree [3]. Similarly, Baechler isolates his motifs in ambiguous spaces, stripping them of any conventional narrative context. This strategy of reduction and isolation is at the heart of both creators’ aesthetics. When Beckett writes “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”, he expresses a sensibility found in Baechler’s works, where the comic and the tragic are inextricably linked. Baechler’s simplified heads, with their minimal and ambiguous expressions, recall Beckett’s characters, both clownish and profoundly melancholic. One thinks in particular of “Flower”, that monumental sculpture by Baechler which presents a stylized, almost caricatural flower, but whose massive presence evokes both celebration and mourning, a typically Beckettian ambivalence. The particular temporality that inhabits Baechler’s work also echoes that of Beckett. In his paintings, time seems suspended, fixed in an eternal present where the motifs float like apparitions. This temporal suspension recalls that of Beckett’s plays, where the action unfolds in a cyclical time, without progression or resolution. “Walking Figure”, that emblematic sculpture by Baechler installed at Gabreski Airport, represents a figure in perpetual motion but paradoxically immobile, a perfect incarnation of the famous phrase from “Endgame”: “Something is taking its course”. Economy of means is another characteristic shared by the two artists. Beckett gradually reduced his writing to the essential, eliminating everything he considered superfluous, until reaching an extreme concentration in his last works. Baechler, in a similar manner, distills his images to their most elementary form, seeking to capture the essence of his subjects with a minimum of lines. This parsimony is not cold minimalism, but rather a search for maximum intensity through reduction. Beckett’s silences find their pictorial equivalent in the empty spaces of Baechler’s compositions, those breathing zones that charge the work with palpable tension. Both artists understand that absence can be as expressive as presence. Repetition, a central strategy in Beckett’s work (consider the circular dialogues of “Godot”), finds a parallel in the way Baechler tirelessly repeats the same motifs, heads, flowers, globes, subjecting them to infinite variations, as if to exhaust their possibilities or reveal their fundamental insignificance. Ultimately, the particular humor that permeates Baechler’s work is akin to that of Beckett: a dark, sometimes grim humor that emerges from the very absurdity of the human condition, from our desperate attempts to create meaning in a world that may be devoid of it. As Beckett wrote in “The Unnamable”: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, a formula that could perfectly describe the productive tension at the heart of Baechler’s artistic enterprise.
To fully appreciate Baechler, one must understand his working method. Far from being a spontaneous gesture, each painting is the result of a process of accumulation and erasure. In his vast Manhattan studio, he obsessively collected images, photographs, newspaper clippings, found drawings, of which he ultimately kept only a tiny fraction for his works. “Out of a thousand images I save, I probably use one or two”, he confided. This manic accumulation was not an end in itself, but the necessary condition for a subsequent choice, a rigorous selection.
What makes Baechler’s works so captivating is precisely this tension between accumulation and reduction, between complexity and simplicity. His backgrounds are visual labyrinths, superimpositions of fabrics, papers, and pictorial layers, while his figures, those famous profiles, flowers, or globes, are of disarming simplicity. There is something heroic in this approach: extracting essential, almost archaic forms from contemporary visual chaos.
Take “Standing Nude (After Shelby Creagh)” from 1982. This work reveals an artist who, paradoxically, strives to unlearn how to draw. The forms are raw, clumsy, deliberately inexperienced. The model’s head is truncated by a white cloud that activates the empty space above the figure. The hands and feet are not even sketched, the limbs taper into sharp points or are cut off by the edges of the paper. This approach marks a break in Baechler’s style, between the relatively graceful drawings of 1981 and his deliberately awkward works of 1983-84, where thick black lines converge towards emblematic, primitive, childish images, which retain all their power.
There is something striking about this lack of articulation, this resistance to the conventional objectives of life drawing. The artist seems to force himself to see with a new eye, to feel what he sees, perhaps by using his non-dominant hand. The result is a stronger, more assured, but also rougher line.
This evolution towards greater roughness and texture characterizes the works of the following years. The line becomes a sinuous entity that perfectly fuses painting and drawing. The surface takes on its own heralded personality, with pieces of glued paper and torn notebook pages that increase the tactility of the support. The collage elements also serve as erasures, obliterating portions of the image, sometimes reformulated or revised, sometimes left as lacunae.
What many interpreted as a naive, childish aesthetic was in reality a sophisticated strategy to create what Baechler called an “integrated fracture”. “I build my surfaces because I don’t want to know what the line is going to do”, he explained. “I want the brush’s journey on the canvas to be not a fluid and easy voyage, I want problems along the way”.
This abrasive material approach became predominant with the drawings inspired by Shelby Creagh, where pieces of muslin are applied to create a rougher and denser surface, forcing the graphite and black acrylic lines to maneuver through a changing topography of creases and fissures, a self-imposed obstacle that bridled the splashing gestures of his previous works.
One of the most remarkable works of this period is “Afrikareise” (1984), apparently based on the avant-garde documentary by the Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka, “Unsere Afrikareise” (Our Trip to Africa, 1966), which follows a group of white European hunters on an African safari. Despite the film’s non-narrative structure, the inequalities of colonialism and the contrast between the pampered foreign exploiters and the exploited natives could not be more marked.
The stoically miserable head floating in the center of “Afrikareise” evokes a multitude of associations, from Custer’s Last Stand and, by implication, the history of conquest and dispossession of Manifest Destiny, to the foolish headdress that Steve Martin wore in his 1970s comedy shows.
Even Baechler’s sculptures, those monumental bronze flowers that seem directly cut from his canvases, are part of this aesthetic of “integrated fracture”. “Walking Figure” (2008), that 9-meter-tall feminine silhouette in aluminum that greets visitors at Suffolk County Airport, is the perfect example. Deliberately flat, almost two-dimensional, it defies the expectations of traditional sculpture while creating an undeniable visual presence.
What makes Donald Baechler an essential artist is his ability to navigate between seemingly contradictory worlds: abstraction and figuration, sophistication and naivety, humor and gravity. In a contemporary artistic landscape obsessed with novelty and rupture, Baechler built a work that subtly dialogues with art history while creating its own visual mythology.
Do not be mistaken: Baechler was not a “graffiti” artist, nor a simple nostalgic for childhood. He was a serious painter, obsessed with formal questions that date back to the dawn of modern art. The fact that his works make us smile does not diminish their artistic ambition; on the contrary, it testifies to his deep understanding of the human condition, both tragic and absurd.
So, the next time you find yourself facing one of those round heads, those stylized flowers, or those emblematic globes, look beyond the image. Observe how the black line struggles against the textured surface, how the simple figure emerges from a chaotic background, how the entire work oscillates between order and disorder, control and abandonment. It is there, in this unresolved tension, that the genius of Donald Baechler resides.
- Robert Pincus-Witten, “Donald Baechler”, Artforum, 2010.
- Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World”, Dyn, no. 6, November 1944.
- Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1952.
