The Brooklyn Rail

Jeremy D. Gilbert-Rolfe, aged seventy-nine, passed away peacefully on August 14, 2024. A resident for many years of New York City and Los Angeles, CA, he died surrounded by his family at his last home in Gainesville, Florida. Jeremy was born August 4, 1945, in Tunbridge Wells, UK, to William H. and Beatrice Alice Gilbert-Rolfe. He is survived by his sister, Elizabeth Skelton, his wife and partner of fifty-two years, Genevieve (Annie) Gilbert-Rolfe, his sons Cyrus and Cedric Gilbert-Rolfe, his grandchildren, Harley, Vincent, and Leiah, as well as his first great grandson Hudson, and two dogs, Sherlock and Pip.

Jeremy was an instructor or visiting lecturer in art and theory beginning at Florida State University in 1968, then Princeton University, Queens College NY, CUNY, Parsons School of Design, Yale School of Architecture with Frank Gehry, Royal Academy School—London, Maryland Institute College of Art, and California Institute of the Art.

However, for twenty-eight years from 1987 to 2015, he truly found a home at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. There he was instrumental in the creation of the Graduate Department of Fine Arts. Through his leadership and determination, he ensured that the department cast a broad net in accepting students from far more diverse origins than was typical of most other schools at the time. He was instrumental in forming a core faculty intentionally chosen for their own unique approaches to art. His advice to students and faculty was that “… students are expected to listen carefully to advice from their professors but not necessarily to take it” echoing Cezanne’s advice to challenge the influential masters, the art that is found in the museums and galleries. For his dedication and leadership in creating and expanding the MFA program to become nationally and internationally known and respected, Jeremy was given the title of Professor/Chair Emeritus upon his retirement in 2015.

Sometimes called the “Mr. Chips of the art world,” an apt comparison given his warm, avuncular presence and profound impact on generations of artists and students, he nevertheless possessed a singular perspective that profoundly challenged and transformed the thinking of all who had the privilege of working with him. Jeremy had a gift for intuitively grasping the essence of an artist or writer's work and then collaborating with them to push their ideas to new, more resonant heights. Possessing an unparalleled ability to pierce through conventional wisdom and lay bare deeper, more complicated truths, he refused to validate or echo accepted norms, a stance that underlined his commitment to challenging his mentees to take bold conceptual risks and embrace a freer, more playful vision of creativity. This transformative approach was rooted in his deep reverence for the creative process and his profound generosity as a teacher.

Jeremy was the author of several books, including Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic Device (1985), Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986–1993 (1995), Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999), The City and Music with Frank Gehry (2001), and numerous essays and articles. He had a horror of fixed categories, and it would be impossible to categorize the variety of his writings. There are, nonetheless, several core themes, most of them driven by his impatience with mainstream art-world discourse, the place where Clement Greenberg’s avant-garde and kitsch collapse on and into themselves. Against this prevailing criticality, Jeremy posited sublimity, complexity, risk, uncertainty, and problems without clear resolutions, and he affirmed a kind of subjectivity that could engage the complexities of the world without flattening contradictions. Jeremy had an unerring eye for the shortcuts artists and their critics take to “repress” problems or turn them into “ironic” responses to nonproblems devoid of seriousness. Jeremy's writings are nothing if not serious, above all in his commitment to what he called “the idea of an independent life for art.” How unfashionable! What could be riskier than affirming art’s distance from mundane life? And yet being serious also meant taking play seriously, and his writings are often playful in the way that his favorite classical composers—like Haydn—could be. His writings, like his paintings, are unlike any other: erudite, citational, lucid, at times cutting, and indomitably independent.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s paintings were first identified with late 1960s post-Minimalism. His paintings use geometric abstraction as a starting point, and from the early 1980s his approach was to incorporate the varied vocabulary of abstraction freely navigating the differing sets of established formal concerns while undermining and destabilizing these orthodoxies. Criticality in both his writing and painting was his primary objective and, like his writing, his paintings are highly complex but also sensual and visual. They are propositional, just as seeing and thinking were simultaneous for him, and the questions he provoked in his paintings led to works that produced contradictions, articulating relationships between seemingly disparate parts such as grids, geometric shapes, linear bars, gestural marks and subtle painterly fields. By structuring compositions that revealed hidden associations or by utilizing color relationships that produced unexpected sensations, he addressed the issue of space in painting “as an invisibility made visible” [JGR] thereby making the viewer aware of the intrinsic nature of how painting and abstraction can activate the processes of perception and experience. Opticality and the retinal, long associated with formalism and denigrated by Duchampian rhetoric are stressed to address the temporality and technology that abstraction can integrate.

While the relationship to philosophy cannot be understated in his works, they are never dogmatic or logical as their essential concern is to maintain an openness through an intuitive and indeterminate approach that rejected any closed hypotheses. Geometric abstraction in his hands resisted formal repetitiveness and unproductive and his determination was how to maintain the generative quality inherent in abstraction while concurrently evoking pleasure. This allowed him to incorporate notions of the decorative, beauty and the feminine, qualities that were considered marginal and “productively irrelevant” [JGR] from a hierarchical perspective of modernism which itself was what Gilbert-Rolfe challenged. His paintings and his writings are concomitant in their dedication to the splendid belief that art should not succumb to forms of vagary.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's loss is profoundly felt, but his legacy as an iconoclastic thinker, painter and champion of the arts will continue to reverberate through the work of all those whose lives he touched

In celebration of his legacy, an exhibition of work by some of his hundreds of students will be held at Art Cake Gallery during the month of April, at which time the Rail will publish an in-depth tribute to Jeremy. He will be buried in the forest at the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery in Gainesville, FL.