- titled: lower left in margin, in pencil
- signed: lower right in margin, in pencil; numbered lower
left in margin, in pencil; printer's chop in lower right
corner
- medium: seven-color etching; printed by Roy Buchman at
L.A. Etch, Los Angeles, California
- dimensions: image size: 23 1/4 x 19 1/8" (59.1 x 48.6
cm); sheet size: 30 3/8 x 25 3/4" (77.2 x 64.5 cm)
- edition: 50 prints, 10 artist's proofs, 2 printer's
proofs, 4 trial proofs; all on white Arches paper
- date published: 1980
Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
Many of my works have been conceived in one or another culture,
developed and enlarged upon, then transformed into a medium
different from the first, being cross-fertilized, so to speak.
Furthermore, flashbacks and local images may inspire variations,
while unexpected events and encounters (the reading of a book or
even some chance momentary meeting), can alter and embellish the
original thought process. Of course, this is not only inevitable
but, for me, desirable, since I am a believer in the theory that
art must reflect life itself and not simply the history of art as
part of the chronological order of things. In such diverse cultures
as France and the United States, where habits and frames of
reference are often at odds, this diversity produces fascinating
and ironic harmonies as well as bizarre misunderstandings at both
ends.
A Little Gem is a good example of how a picture can be
reinterpreted when exhibited in different contexts and cultures.
When I first moved to Arles in Provence in the mid-70s, I lived in
a lower-class countrified region called Monvoisin, within walking
distance of the well-known railroad trestle painted by Van Gogh,
off the corner of the locale of his famous "Yellow House" at the
Place de la Gare (which was destroyed by allied bombs in World War
II). I arrived in the month of May after an exhaustive house search
throughout Languedoc and Roussillon, and finally (in a desperate
need to get to work), settled in a dark, heavily furnished
bourgeois home on the outskirts of Arles. I wasn't told the name of
the street the house was on until hands were shaked, toasts
exchanged, and the lease signed - it was literally, the road
between two railroads. The tracks were 3 or 4 meters from the
living room, no more than 20 feet away and the ensuing rumbling
quaking crescendi approached and faded like the tympani in a great
Beethoven symphony.
I didn't know at the time that the work I was about to create
was to be called the Arles Suite but I did know that my adrenalin
was flowing hot and I wanted everything about what was happening to
somehow be a part of the art I was making. One of the first
collages I did was called Chemin Entre Les Deux Gares, and,
in my mind, represented a sort of topographical, map-like,
geometric color layout documenting the weird placement in which I
found myself. Surely I must have known at the time that this highly
stylized, simplified version of an emblematic post-cubist
overlapping of planes would appear to any viewer as a totally
abstract work, but I nevertheless maintained to myself that "I was
There" somewhere in the center of this configuration. Call it
fantasy or exaggerated imagination, I was sure that there was some
significant biographical data that could be honed from this cryptic
non-representational expression.
In any case, I knew that these forms were strong and that the
enmeshed quadrangles worked, and that my efforts here represented
some sort of dynamic perfection of space and color. The collage was
exhibited in France under its original title in several galleries
and museums and some years later, looking at this piece in Los
Angeles, I decided to add certain nuances and adapt the image to an
aquatint medium. I retained the original locked-together shapes but
ornamented the image with intaglio relief and the clean luminosity
of etched plates on Arches paper. The effect was stunning to
me - very clean and suddenly very American. The problem now was the
title, which required ponderous explanation and which, in turn,
made United States audiences look at the picture in curious way...
searching for a house and a railroad which was never there in the
first place.
The crispness and cut or faceted quality of the intaglio pleaded
to be accounted for, and the title, A Little Gem, also had
the advantage of being a slangy double entendre, a leaning towards
irony I suppose I inherited in my teens from Gertrude Stein, the
dadaists, and James Joyce. That was it! In one swoop the image
became A Little Gem and no longer encapsulated or needed the
anecdotal and superfluous explanation of railroads, Provence,
houses, or anything else. Now sometimes when I look at this work I
wonder how the heck, and under what influence, it could have been
conceived with the mysterious title relationship I so confidently
gave it. Even I, l'artiste meme, became an actor in this theater of
creation.
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