The Brooklyn Rail

A retrospective of painter and Conceptual artist Stephen Kaltenbach opened, then quickly closed, at the University of California, Davis’s Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in early spring 2020. Its centerpiece was Portrait of My Father (1972–79), a densely layered, about 10 by 14 foot painting depicting the artist’s dying father, mouth open, resting on his back in a penumbral tangle of glowing white head and beard hairs. Before COVID interfered, the show offered the first opportunity to date to see the painting, which is now on view at the Crocker Art Museum in nearby Sacramento, in context with work from across the artist’s fifty-year career.

Jordan Stein’s multifaceted Stephen Kaltenbach: Portrait of My Father seizes on the lost opportunity. The book presents an extended interview with the artist (ten-plus hours of recorded conversations condensed and organized in crisp segments) alongside vivid reproductions of Portrait, related works, and a range of ephemera, including reference images and working models the artist used to invent and reinvent his approach. Stein uses this array of materials to bring readers close to Kaltenbach himself, both as a young artist embarking on a major work and as he is now, at the end of his career, looking back. This intimate proximity generates surprising lines of inquiry, which Stein develops in short, italicized commentaries distributed throughout the book.

Kaltenbach started painting Portrait of My Father in 1972 in a friend’s boyfriend’s neighbor’s nineteenth-century barn just outside Davis, California. He worked from a photograph and a vision he had had several years earlier while tripping on LSD for the first time of a “pattern/image combination” that included “two images on the same surface … without conflict between them.” True to this vision, the finished painting merges a hyper-realistic, greyscale rendering of a dying old man with a colorful, shining, allover pattern of interlocking stems and loops. In his interview with Stein, Kaltenbach narrates the process of its creation, recounting how he transferred his father’s image to a massive canvas tacked to his barn-studio wall then took new photographs of his uncle for reference. He experimented with black-and-white and full-color approaches and decided to render individual beard hairs and other details in the manner of a Grandma Moses landscape. He studied William Morris designs then fabricated clear plexiglass models of a derivative pattern to test how light would filter and refract through it onto his father’s image.

Stein supplements the artist’s responses with visual examples ranging from documentation of the Portrait in-progress to works the artist cites as inspiration. The book’s rich accumulation of narrative and visual details foregrounds the Portrait’s complexities and helps situate the painting in the longer arc of the artist’s career and the trajectories of other members of his art-historical cohort, including Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Lee Lozano, and John Torreano, among others.

Kaltenbach moved to New York City from California in 1967. Like many young artists of the period, he initially sought to invent a distinctive persona or artistic brand, which Stein characterizes as, “mischievous, relatively austere, and nearly anonymous.” Kaltenbach won quick, significant attention for his Conceptualist projects, which included sealed time capsules, plaques of single words intended to be installed in city sidewalks, and unsigned ads placed in Artforum instructing readers to “Tell a Lie” and “Become a Legend.” His work was featured in group and solo exhibitions at leading galleries and in shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1970, just as his career momentum was cresting, Kaltenbach left New York abruptly. After teaching gigs in Sacramento and Madison, Wisconsin, he determined to live and work in relative anonymity in California’s Central Valley.

Stein cites prior interviews and published statements in which the artist explained his relocation as a component of a larger, career-spanning Conceptual work designed to “screw with [his own] reputation” and confront the “art establishment’s sense of right and wrong.” Stein acknowledges these explanations, but he also contests them, both directly and in his book’s overall design. His detailed consideration of Kaltenbach’s larger body of work makes the artist’s return to California and his commitment to achieving the spiritually-infused vision of his Portrait seem too earnest, and too contradictory, to be reduced to a concept. When Stein asks Kaltenbach to reflect on what he has accomplished over his career, the artist responds, “I can’t think of anything I can take credit for. I did it, but it all happened to me.” Stein’s book shows that what happened to Stephen Kaltenbach as he navigated the lures of reputation and acclaim that characterized the art world of the 1970s is less important than what he created as a result.