Adja Yunkers: To Invent a Garden
Modern art has frequently been enriched by cross-cultural influences, but Adja Yunkers’s inspirations were unusually diverse, including religious icons, Renaissance art, social realism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. Born in Latvia in 1900, Yunkers ran off to Saint Petersburg to study art when he was 14 (encountering the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich), then worked as a commercial artist in Cuba in the 20s and as a fine artist in Sweden in the 30s and 40s. He also lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Berlin. In 1947 he moved to the United States–where he married his fifth wife, art critic Dore Ashton–and lived here until he died in 1983.
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In his Swedish period, Yunkers concentrated on printmaking, borrowing from cubism, surrealism, and German expressionism. A 1946 review by Josephine Gibbs–quoted by Marek Bartelik in his excellent catalog essay–describes Yunkers’s prints as looking like “richly pigmented oils on paper, overlaid with glazes.” Indeed The Green Atelier (1944) is evocatively layered–and like most of Yunkers’s European prints, it’s almost cramped. His work shifted when he moved to America (Yunkers told an interviewer, “I don’t have any history. I just started here”), in part influenced by the vast space and clear light of New Mexico, where he initially lived in summer. Pieta d’Avignon (1951) is an abstracted version of a 15th-century painting of the same name: Yunkers opens up the space by reducing the heads of the three women surrounding Christ’s body to only a few lines. Though some lines and forms collide, flowing, lyrical curves and gentle tans predominate, giving the work an expansive look.
The square shapes of the 1978 Icon IX (mistakenly reproduced sideways in the catalog, as are several other late abstractions) in some ways resemble the work of Josef Albers: Yunkers sets a black square within a slightly larger gray square on a deep purple field. But the way the squares float and their mysteriously indistinct edges, testing the limits of perceptibility, place them leagues apart from Albers’s ethos. Reflecting the influence of Malevich and Rothko, this painting has an uncanny iconic power yet seems profoundly tentative, both self-assertive and evanescent. One can almost see the artist acknowledging his influences while thinking, “Yes, but on the other hand…”
A notion in traditional Chinese painting often translated as “spirit” seems visible here in the way Mu Xin’s surfaces are animated by an invisible energy. Waterfalls springing from darker land in Mountains Enclosing the Chu River seem a manifestation of the land’s life force. Ink congeals into the shapes of trees, which seem to grow before one’s eyes. Contrasting three perceptions of time, Mu Xin captures the immediacy of flowing water, the slow growth of trees, and the greater permanence of rock; his randomizing processes also suggest natural patterns of growth and decay.
