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by Jody Zellen

October 24, 2024


Nathan Gluck
Unlocking The Mind: Nathan Gluck's Early Surrealist Collages
Luis de Jesus Gallery
September 14 - October 26, 2024


Nathan Gluck

Nathan Gluck (1918-2008) was an artist, designer, illustrator and art director. He also happened to be Andy Warhol's studio assistant from the early 1950s through the mid 1960s. He was intimately involved in art and literary circles, meeting artists, architects and designers including Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp and Philip Johnson — and these associations filtered into his own production. Though early on in his multifaceted career he was not primarily not known for his artworks, he was widely exhibited later in life.

Gluck amassed a vast body of work, (making collages for over 70 years) and on view at Luis de Jesus Gallery are a selection borrowed from his estate and created in the 1930s and 1940s. These elegant, small scale works were influenced by Surrealism and share a kinship with other artists making collages at this time including Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Hanna Hoch, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. The exhibit also includes vitrines with books, documents and ephemera that showcase many of these influences.

It is wonderful to see cut and paste collages in the digital age where one becomes acutely aware of the hand work involved in the montaging, as well as the old-fashioned source materials. And Gluck's pieces demand close scrutiny. The earliest work in the exhibit Untitled (9-26-1939), includes an actual photogram that Gluck created while attending Pratt Institute in 1938. The collage juxtaposes a photogram of silhouetted leaves and shells that allude to undersea worlds with black and white cut outs from old book pages and features a mermaid, the sun, a rose and a crescent moon with a detailed face.

Gluck created a suite of collages based on Paul Klee’s 1929 book, La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) where he removed womans' heads from found images while replacing them with various utilitarian objects. In The Pet Bird (1941), a Victorian era woman with a pocket watch as a face leans forward to gaze at a small bird that has been freed from a nearby cage. Other collages from 1941 in the exhibition include The Invalid, In The Paris Observatory, Passaic Falls at Valley Forge and Military Maneuvers in a Georgia Swamp. These works incorporate fragments from magazines montaged with engraved book pages and though black and white, they still reflect the different colors and tones of reproductions and printed papers of the time.

The background image for In The Paris Observatory features a man looking up through a gigantic telescope toward the stars and beyond. In the foreground, Gluck collages a disproportionately smaller man stretched out on a recliner who also gazes up toward the sky. In the center of the image is a young man with wings who holds a framed image of a man's head. Two other portraits of women appear in the scene, but they are looking out at the viewer rather than at the sky or the men.

Many of Gluck's collages are extremely detailed and contain complex, albeit obtuse narratives that can be pieced together, or not depending on the viewer's motivation to appreciate the works visually —or conceptually— as both options are possible. Some of the later works dating from 1942 and 1943 are more colorful and de Chirico-esque. In Untitled (12-29-1943), an illustration of a dapper woman wearing a plaid coat holds what appears to be a giant pocket watch. The painted foreground depicts a brown road surrounded by abstract buildings and smoke stacks that recede toward a white railing behind which Gluck has collaged more imagery of smokestacks below a light blue sky. Untitled (12-30-1943) has a similar composition. Here, a black and white line drawing of a woman holding up a child dominates the bottom quarter of the small collage. Her feet are strangely submerged in a green curvilinear shape that signs for grass or a small pond. Behind her is a train (also a black and white illustration) that passes along the diagonal in front of a light pink building with gray windows. Hovering in the painted gray-blue sky is a painted yellow balloon whose exact size is hard to determine.

It is a delight to enter into Gluck's imagination and begin to decipher the Surreal narratives he has created. Collage is a medium that has allowed for fun and experimentation throughout the years and it is wonderful to go back in time, reflect on what was happening in the world then and try to understand what Gluck was thinking and feeling when he created these obtuse yet satisfying works.