Name Irwin Kremen | Role Artist | |
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Books The Art of Irwin Kremen, SE [backwards Capital E]: Collages by Irwin Kremen Education Black Mountain College, Harvard University | ||
Irwin Kremen (born 1925) is an American artist who began making art while Director of the Duke University Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology, when he was 41, after earning a Ph.D. six years earlier in clinical psychology at Harvard University.
Contents
Kremen's artwork mainly consists of non-representational collage, sculpture, and painting. In his later years he has defined a fourth grouping which he calls “multimodes." These are syntheses of the other three or sometimes of just two. Early on, he worked in the first three modes but in 1969, while on sabbatical in Florence, Italy as a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, he began to compose collages of weathered paper and continued this for a decade. Becoming unhappy with conventional methods of gluing collage elements, he developed a conservational method of affixing the disparate pieces together via tiny hinges of Japanese paper.
In the late 1970s, while continuing collage making, Kremen returned to three-dimensional work, now in iron and scrap steel, and by the later '90s entered a collaboration with the sculptor William Noland. Over the next decade they made monumentally sized works, three of which were exhibited in Kremen's 2007 retrospective at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art. He also sporadically resumed work with acrylic paints and toward the late '90s began making painted panels below which were rows of collages arranged rhythmically.
Among Kremen's major works is the Re'eh Series, a single work relative to the Holocaust, consisting of 11 narrative collages.
Life
Kremen was born and raised in Chicago, and attended Northwestern University for two-and-a-half years before leaving in 1945 to become a reporter on ‘’The Chicago Journal of Commerce’’. By that time he had independently encountered avant-garde art and modern literature and had begun writing poetry. Whereupon, in 1946, he left Chicago for the renowned Black Mountain College, an experimental educational community founded in 1933 near Asheville, N.C. There Kremen spent his time focussed on writing and the literature classes given by the poet M. C. Richards.
Beginning in 1947 and for the next eight years he lived in Greenwich Village, writing, reading widely, working variously in bookstores and in publishing, and broadening his knowledge of art and its history. And he became involved with the avant-garde circle around John Cage to whom he had been introduced by M.C. Richards in 1951 in New York, as also to David Tudor and Merce Cunningham. In 1953 Cage dedicated to Kremen the score of 4'33" in proportional notation, as later he also did the Tacet versions of 4'33", the published editions of the so-called silent piece. During that time he married Barbara Herman whom he had met at a Cage concert; completed a B.A. at The New School for Social Research; and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University. With his wife Barbara Kremen and their two children he left Cambridge for a professorial position on the faculty of the Psychology Department at Michigan State University. Two years later he joined that faculty at Duke University, and in another three years, in 1966, made his first work of art. He retired from Duke in 1992, and continues to make art.
Art
In 1977, after having kept his art private for twelve years, Kremen, then 54, agreed to an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) with two solo venues, the first in 1978 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, and the second in 1979, at its Museum in Washington. Twenty-nine solo venues followed, all but two in museums or contemporary art centers, and his work has been included in 27 group shows. The first exhibit of the Re'eh Series was held in 1985 at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA; nine other exhibits of it have followed. In the spring of 2007, the Nasher Museum of Art presented Kremen’s first retrospective. It included more than 172 works – collage, painting and sculpture – spanning each of the 40 years of Kremen’s art-making since he began at age 41. In 2011, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC held an exhibit of Kremen's late work.