They also shared a mutual patron in the legendary Hilla Rebay, cofounder of the Guggenheim Museum. For eight years, from 1946 to ’53, they were friendly rivals-the Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque of nonobjective art on the West Coast, promoting each other’s work and sharing enthusiasms, discoveries, and occasionally studio space and art supplies. What many people are not aware of is the close relationship between these two artists at the outset of their careers.
#Cardsmith white in art box series
Brooklyn-based Zap Cassettes is bringing out a release of Belson’s home-recorded autoharp music this year, and experimental musician Henry Kaiser is collaborating with the Belson estate on a series of releases of Belson’s tape compositions from the 1970s and ’80s. These shows were followed in 2019 by a major solo exhibition of paintings at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and by important European museum exhibitions in Barcelona, Geneva, and London. Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space-Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity, at the Galerie Buchholz, New York, in 2017–18, set Belson alongside Tony Conrad, Jutta Koether, Sigmar Polke, Sun Ra, and more. In Dark Star: Abstraction and Cosmos, an exhibition at the Planthouse gallery, New York, in 2016, Belson’s work was shown alongside that of Smith, Tamara Gonzales, Philip Taaffe, and others. Currently in preparation are recordings of over one hundred songs and chants of the legendary kabbalist Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, made by Smith on the Lower East Side in 1953–54, as well as his 1982 Naropa Institute lectures on Native American cosmology, “The Rationality of Namelessness.” Smith has become a one-man culture industry, astonishing for someone who spent his final years shuffling between homeless shelters on the Bowery before dying penniless in a small room in the Chelsea Hotel.īecause Belson was extremely reclusive in the later part of his life, his career has lagged behind Smith’s by about two decades, but that has also begun to change. Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways Records, 1952) was rereleased on CD to great acclaim by the Smithsonian in 1997, and in 2020 Atlanta’s Dust to Digital label issued a companion box set of the B sides of the 78-rpm records on the Anthology-as if that artifact could not be more fully excavated. This year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing a full-length biography of Smith by John Szwed, who has written acclaimed biographies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Alan Lomax, and Billie Holiday. The Getty Research Institute has devoted not one but two symposia to his work, and acquired his archives in 2013.
Since Smith’s death, in 1991, his reputation has exploded, with each year bringing new exhibitions, books, box sets of music, and restorations of films. Two of the foremost pioneers of the occult aesthetic in America, Harry Smith and Jordan Belson, are currently enjoying long-overdue recognition. As recently as 2019, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, unexpectedly saw its exhibition of Hilma af Klint-a recondite spiritualist-attract 600,000 visitors, becoming the best-attended show in the museum’s history. Not so long ago, such concerns were quite simply the death knell for an artist. One of the more pronounced shifts in the cultural zeitgeist of recent years has been an attraction to works grounded in occult or esoteric traditions. Art history can be a capricious affair: a complex chronicle constantly written and rewritten, based on changes in style, fashion, and collective consciousness.
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