The Insider Art of Tamas Panitz

by Robert Kelly

In recent years we hear a lot about Outsider art, by which term we have come to identify art, usually painting and drawing, done by strange people who have not enjoyed the benefit (dubious?) of a formal arts education or reception in the arts community of wherever they live.  We think of Wölffli in Switzerland or Darger in Chicago. Near Lausanne there is a museum dedicated to such art — Paradise at last after their obscure lives.

The term “Outsider” implies that there is an insider kind of art, made by “real” artists, who have gone to art school, have colleagues aplenty in their chosen field, rivals, allies, galleries to show them, poets (Apollinaire, Ashbery, Lauterbach, Schjeldahl, Yau…) to write their praises, reviews, articles, journals, museums, glory, money.  It’s all we mean when we say, “the Art World.”

But I submit that there is another kind of insider art — an art made by people who are deeply at work in some other form of art, writing, philosophy, music, people who are thorough “insiders” in their field, but who venture, out of inmost need, to create in the visual world.  I think of Goethe’s watercolors, Ruskin’s drawings, D.H. Lawrence’s paintings and Henry Miller’s, and the recently celebrated schematic renderings of inner space by Hilma af Klimt.  

It is with such exemplars in mind that I choose to call Panitz’s painting “insider art.”  Tamas Panitz has published half a dozen books of poetry, has directed several small presses, edited two influential journals of new writing, is close-connected with several “schools” of poetic practice in the US and abroad.  He is, in every sense of the term, a “real poet” — and his recent work reminds us that the verb from which “poetry” derives,  poiein, is the Greek verb for “to make.”  Poets can make anything. And, for the past year or so, Panitz has been making paintings.  

Outsider art is typically illustration — figurative renderings of what the artist wants to see, essentially Figure Important on Unimportant Ground.  In our usual sense of Art, the whole surface of the image is important, the brushstroke in the cloud as important as the smile on the angel’s lips.  And it is this very quest for the integral image that characterizes Panitz’s work.  I often feel, studying his recent work especially, that the background is the real subject — as it certainly so often is with Turner’s greatest paintings.  The figure exists for the sake of the ground.

In the very recent “In Memory of Paintings Lost at Sea,” a tottering vessel, oddly ensailed, is swarmed over by the richest tumult of sky and sea.  And so it is with earlier images: the cow stands almost like a cutout figure in a richly orchestrated meadow; a bottle stands on a table for the sake of the gleams on its cut-glass facets, the fleshy rumpled tablecloth beyond it.

His insistence on the integrity of the surface is, almost playfully, embodied in the surfaces he chooses — framed pictures under glass, on which, intact, he paints.  It shouts out the reversal of value, Umwertung, not the “subject” of the painting, illustrational though it may be.  Not the subject, the mind where it arises, the tumult from which any image comes to mind, comes to be seen. The sea is greater than the ship.  The room he sits in is a storm around the man.  A painting makes us see what we have never seen — we know that man, we have been in that room.  But we have never seen it till now.  

Those who are interested in such things will note that Panitz was born, and spent his first years, in Budapest before being brought, still a young child, to Maryland. There is a Magyar melancholy in his work, a constant sense of what is around us. We think of it as background, but it is the real thing that lingers as we pass away. The Hungarian painter Tivadar Csontváry (d. 1919) left a body of work that astonished me when I first saw it — it seemed the spiritual ancestor of Panitz’s way of seeing, though Panitz seems not to have known of it. Perhaps the spirit of place traveled with him, and now reanimates his own, our own, local spaces that loom around our lives. //