Memoir: Chapter 13, Philosophers, Scientists, and Artists: Pioneers of a New Era in Art

Foundation for the Advancement of Art Conference at the Pierre Hotel in New York

An interesting emotional catalyst for me to create the Foundation for the Advancement of Art Conference was inspired by a section of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, which has always reminded me of a march of the world's greatest entering the gates of heaven. No matter how many times I've heard it, I always get a deja vu of this same visualization of heroes like Aristotle and Michelangelo entering heaven. This romantic vision inspired me to recreate this grandeur in real life by inviting the greatest minds and artists I knew to discuss art at my conference in New York.

During one of my times in New York, my dear friend and collector, Kip Durney, stayed at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Her beautiful room overlooking Central Park felt like a real bedroom suite in a palace, combining the intimacy of a home with extraordinary wealth. Kip and I descended to the lobby, where she sought advice from the maître d' on a dining recommendation. The maître d' suggested La Tulipe, a nearby small French restaurant. It was also understated and elegant, with food that was simply out of this world. I was impressed by the maître d's spot-on recommendation. When considering the ideal venue for our art conference, the Pierre Hotel immediately came to mind as a symbol of taste at the highest level.

191 Pierre Hotel, left with aqua-green roof.

It was a great honor to have philosopher and my friend, Stephen Hicks act has chairman of ceremonies, and he opened the conference with these remarks:

“The world of high art exhibits a sense of having exhausted its major themes and a weariness with the current variations on those themes. Many who move in the circles of high art are aware of the sense of exhaustion, but few have a clear sense of where to go next. Many who move outside of the circles of high art are critical of current modern and postmodern trends, pushing for a return to the past, for a return to tradition.

“Our purpose is to introduce and stress a different theme and purpose: to move the arts forward. We have today a sampling of those thinkers, artists, scientists, and philosophers working on reclaiming for the arts the cultural high ground they once had achieved and to use that as an advantage for launching exploration of new territories. There are few more important cultural purposes.”

Stephen Hicks's opening remarks set the tone for the conference, emphasizing the theme of advancing the arts and moving away from the triteness of 20th-century nihilism. Each speaker echoed this theme in their unique way, exploring how to repair the damage caused by postmodernism and propel art forward to new horizons through innovation, perception, humanism, and passion.

192 Michael Newberry. All photos from the conference were taken by Anna Moody.

Innovation in Art by Michael Newberry

I was the first speaker to present. At the time of giving my talk, Innovation in Art, I was a mid-career artist with international recognition, having exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Italy, and Athens, Greece. My artworks were lovingly collected worldwide, with sales amounting to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, achieved without taking commissions, i.e., exclusively painting what I love.

In my talk, I pointed out that the future of art needed to have both representational content and innovation, where we couldn't go back to the past. For a viable figurative art future, there needed to be integrated advancements in subject matter, concepts, and means. I contrasted classical artists like Bosch, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo with surreal and abstract artists such as Mondrian, Magritte, and Rothko. Then, I gave examples of how contemporary representational artists Martine Vaugel, Mark Feldman, Bryan Larsen, and myself have learned from both schools of thought and integrated the best of representation with abstraction, psychology, philosophy, and passion to create innovative and dynamic realist art.

Takeaway: Today’s artists need to learn from successes and failures from each movement, then integrate the best from the best and evolve both the ends and means.  

193 Stephen R. C. Hicks

From Modern to Postmodern Art and Beyond by Stephen R. C. Hicks

I've already introduced philosopher Stephen Hicks in an earlier chapter, and we've been friends for a long time. But there's a couple of things about Stephen that most people don't know. He paid his way through college by working summers as an oil rig operator, which is a fascinating contrast between the physically rough "man's man" dirty work and studying to become a doctor of philosophy. It harks back to the ancient Greek philosophers, who did military service.

When he was visiting me at my Coffee Pot Bayou house in Florida, we were talking about art and philosophy and making plans for the conference. Classical music played in the background, featuring an aria sung by my artistic hero, Leontyne Price. One of her mottos is to love your voice. Stephen paused to listen very closely to her singing, and his eyes welled up. I was surprised by this, as it added a level of sensitivity to his character that I had previously been unaware of. It made him almost artistic.

His talk at the conference, From Modern to Postmodern Art and Beyond, was critical of common criticism of postmodern art, such as "my 5-year-old could do that," believing rightly so that it wouldn't gain any serious traction in the intellectual and artistic worlds. Delving much deeper he explored the cynicism of philosophical, political, and scientific movements from the late 19th century and how artists picked up this cynicism, which led them to eliminate the elements that made up figurative and representational art.

Hicks then went on to share telling examples of the eliminations of form, light, space, and color from painting, leading to a blank canvas. "Malevich's White on White, in which he eliminates all content, form, line, shape, even color, not a thing is left on the canvas. This is the ultimate eliminationism."

He commented that once they eliminated painting as a viable artistic expression of contemporary culture, postmodern artists realized they needed to sneak back in content, themes, and ideas as long as they were cynical, and that would allow them to ride the postmodern nihilistic movement.

“Postmodernism, I think this introduces four variations. The first one is that it found a way to reintroduce content, but with the proviso that this content must be self-referential and ironic.”

Hicks then meticulously described, showed, and connected to postmodern concepts extremely disturbing postmodern artworks dealing with incest, bestiality, abuse, body fluids, and racism. It is an unsavory laundry list of nihilistic thought, psychotic pathologies communicated through unconventional art, leaving no hope for humanity in sight.

“The fourth variation, as I see it, is not simply power, money, and sex. Those are still fairly significant, abstract, and important themes in art. We can be more nihilistic, and we find in modern or postmodern art a more ruthless nihilism, focusing on the utterly base and reductionistic.

“In 2000, there was a notorious exhibition in Denmark involving a series of blenders on a counter and a number of goldfish. All participants were invited to take goldfish, put them into a blender, and turn the blender on. Art as a matter of taking life and reducing it to indiscriminate liquid entrails.”

Towards end of his talk, he calls for a "bold new move”:

"At the heart of every revolution is an artist who achieves originality, a novel theme, a fresh subject, or the inventive use of composition, color, or figure that marks the beginning of a new era.

"The point is not to return, nor can it be, to the 1880s or to turn art into making pretty postcards; that would be demeaning. The point about being an artist is being a human being who can look at the world afresh. In each generation, it seems that there are only a few who are capable of doing that at the highest level. That's always the challenge of art and its highest calling. The world of postmodern art, by contrast, is a rundown hall of mirrors reflecting tired, recent innovations that were introduced over a century ago. It's time to move on."

Takeaway: Hicks delivers a devasting critique of the dead-end variations of postmodern art ideology, then also calls for a fresh new take on humanist art.  

194 Jan Koenderink

Science and Art in the 21st Century by Jan Koenderink

It is worth repeating that I felt a wonderful connection meeting vision scientists Jan Koenderink and his wife Andrea Van Doorn. They have explored and continued to explore visual perception from almost every angle possible. Connecting with them felt like they were me but as scientists. I was terribly honored that Jan agreed to represent them at the conference. And it is also worth highlighting Jan’s extraordinary background.

Dr. Jan Koenderink, a distinguished physicist and mathematician, graduated in physics and mathematics in 1967 at Utrecht University. After a period in experimental psychology at the University of Durham in 1974, he returned to Utrecht University, where he held the chair of "The Physics of Man" in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He founded the Helmholtz Institute, which coordinates multidisciplinary work in psychology, biology, medicine, physics, and computer science. In 1987, he received an honorary doctorate in medicine from Leuven University in Belgium. In 1990, he was appointed by the Queen as a member of the Dutch Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. He participates in the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals and scientific boards of international conferences and institutes. His major interest concerns the structure of consciousness. His work also includes the mathematics and psychophysics of space and form in vision and active touch, the structure of perceptual spaces, and ecological optics, including applications in art and design.

Jan brought a unique perspective to the conference by blending his scientific expertise with a serious appreciation for the arts. His lecture traced the historical intertwining of science and art, lamenting the modern divide that has stifled interdisciplinary dialogue. As he eloquently put it:

"It's also true that many scientists were interested in the arts. They wrote about it, spoke about it, and many artists were interested in the sciences and even considered themselves scientists. A good example, for instance, is John Constable, who spoke about his paintings as the experiments of the science of painting. Well-known examples include the scientific studies of clouds, which had an important impact on the arts of the time."

Reflecting on his insights, I found resonance in his observation about the 20th-century shift:

"Clearly, since World War I, science, art, and society as a whole have gone through dramatic changes. There has been a loosening of bonds with the past and a loss of identity. Many scientists and my colleagues have very little patience with artistic matters. Sometimes they collect art, but usually, artists feel about science as an incomprehensible joke. I think this can be traced to the general ignorance of the public at large with respect to science and art alike."

His discourse on the non-Euclidean nature of pictorial space resonated deeply for me, where he described how painters manipulate optics that give the sense of believable 3d forms perceived by the viewer:

"Painters effectively communicate mind to mind, from their imagination to the observer's perception, creating a three-dimensional experience on a two-dimensional plane.”

Lastly, I was thoughtful about his optimistic outlook and warning:

“I have noticed for several years that my friends in these sciences tend to scout for 19th-century books on academic art techniques and practices because it is important for their science. So you see here a little link between these novel sciences and the arts. It is interesting because it might mean that we are approaching an epoch where the lessons from Leonardo might be rewritten for the education of the 21st-century Neo-Renaissance man, with science and art again being natural components of our intellectual profile, important in interactions between sophisticated individuals.

“This involves a change of emphasis in both sciences and art, but I think this might actually be good because it might save both from oblivion in the long term.”

Takeaway: Koenderink bemoans the loss of common ground of visual perception of scientists and artists, and how revitalizing visual perception may get humanity back on a healthy and flourishing track.

Intermission

During the intermission, attendees enjoyed an open bar with hors d'oeuvres. My one regret was that I was so engaged in the conference and its proceedings that I couldn't enjoy the specialties or drinks. However, it was a wonderful opportunity to touch base with these wonderful people.

Some of the them had flown to New York for the conference from places as far away as California, Greece, London, and New Zealand. The international audience included major figures from the worlds of arts and letters, including Stephen Farthing from the New York Academy of Art, Jennifer Trainer Thompson from MASS MoCA, and Lee Minaidis from the Organization of World Heritage Cities.

Also in the audience were Louis Torres, co-author of What Art Is, Marsha Enright, founder of the College of the United States and creator of the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute (RIFI), Ed Hudgins from the Atlas Society, and Lindsay Perigo, the founding member of New Zealand’s Libertarianz party and editor of The Free Radical.

Fun facts: Perigo had published several of my aesthetic articles in The Free Radical. Three of the attendees had modeled for me—Anna Moody for the as-of-yet uncompleted Venus, Jennifer Trainer Thompson who posed for Promethia, and Robert Mechielsen who posed for The Writer and the Artist. Additionally, Mechielsen, Thompson, Holverstott, Enright, Hicks, Kelley, Moody, and Vaugel are collectors of my art.

195 Martine Vaugel

Martine Vaugel (Passionist Sculptor)

Martine Vaugel is one of my favorite sculptors, living and from history, and someone I am honored to call a lifelong friend. Martine is extraordinarily passionate, wickedly intelligent, very mathematical, and one of the most expressive people I've ever met, coming from a place of heart and authenticity.

Early in our friendship, I visited her in her magnificent New Rochelle, New York, 2000-square-foot open studio with high ceilings. Many of her most well-known sculptures were displayed throughout the space. One of them was a 14-foot work-in-progress clay sculpture. We were meeting just to touch base and talk about art, but then she asked me if I wouldn't mind posing for that monumental work. The sculpture was essentially done, but she thought of using my face. It was one of the rare times that I got to switch roles and be the subject of an artist's intentions.

While I was posing, Martine was making corrections on the sculpture's face, which was about 11 feet up. Of course, she had to use a ladder to sculpt the face. She began removing some facial features, like the ear and nose from the original, and she would console herself, saying things like, "That's okay, baby. Just let it go. Don't worry, it's okay. Just release it. Let it go." Then she started sculpting my ear or nose to replace the missing ones, saying things like, "Oh yeah, baby, that's it!"

After 20 minutes or so, we would sit down, have tea, and look at the sculpture from about 16 feet away. In contrast to her very nurturing, emotional, supportive creativity, she went into analytical mode, saying, "Oh damn, I placed the ear too high; I have to realign it to place it in the right spot." After our tea, we went back to work, and then she again entered the intensely emotional state, moaning and consoling herself as she moved the ear to a new spot, and then her excitement that her additions were working both anatomically and for the sculpture as a whole. It was a masterclass on positive, flowing creativity while in the act of sculpting, paired with intense, almost scientific, assessment from a distance.

I posed for about three hours while she worked on the structure of the jawline, basically blocking out my head on this monumental sculpture. Then, at our last break, she expressed great disappointment, saying it looked like an Aryan God, and she couldn't have that. A German-looking warrior wasn’t in her plans.

I guess some models would be upset by that, but I found it amusing, mainly because I was with her every step of the way and understood the creative process of destroying some of the work that had already been done and replacing it with something new. There was the excitement that it might work really well, and then the realization that it was a good try but not going to serve the work well.

Career Highlights

To provide a fuller context of Martine Vaugel’s remarkable contributions to art, here is an overview of her distinguished background and achievements.

Martine Vaugel is a renowned international sculptor, honored with two awards in the International Rodin Grand Prize Monumental Figure Competition. Her sculptures grace prestigious locations such as Japan’s Hakone and Utsukushi-ga Hara Open Air Museums, The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and The New Tate Modern Museum. Her works are also featured in the Nelson Rockefeller Collection and have been acquired by Presidents Carter, Aquino, Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush.

Vaugel’s celebrated portraits include figures such as Mayor Tom Bradley, Mother Teresa, and Sir Richard Attenborough. Her sculptures are displayed at the Self Realization Fellowship, Patsaouras Plaza in Los Angeles, UCLA Medical Center, and the Château de Brissac in France.

Her accolades include the Bronze Medal and Silver Medal at the Salon des Artistes Français in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and the First Prize at the Versailles Biennale d’Arte Contemporaine in 2017. She also received the Arthur LeDuc Jury Prize for best sculpture at the Salon des Artistes Français in 2018.

A former Sculpture Director at the New York Academy of Art and a teacher at the Sculpture Center in NYC, Vaugel has founded studio schools in California, North Carolina, New York, and France, further contributing to the art world’s education and development.

Martine’s Lecture

In her lecture, Martine eloquently expressed the deep connection between historical influence and personal innovation in creating meaningful art. She said, "It's the truth of the art of the past, added to our personal innovation and perspective, that creates the art of the present and then the art of the future. My having looked into Rembrandt's eyes at the Met as a child and seeing the pain and suffering in those great paintings was, for me, the beginning of my life as an artist."

Martine also shared her candid thoughts on the challenges she faced within the art world. "I've been kept out of shows in New York, and I've been doing this work since I was 13 years old. My first commission was for Nelson Rockefeller when I was 23, and no matter how many people have said, 'Oh, they love it, they love it,' I still couldn't get into the New York art scene. So it's a very interesting thing that one could be doing real work, contemporary work. I hate the fact that the word 'contemporary' has been stolen from us as artists."

Martine Vaugel concluded her lecture by discussing several of her significant works, each embodying her unique perspective and creative vision. For instance, she elaborated on the piece titled A Woman Holding Desire, describing its inspiration, thematic elements, and the profound messages it conveys:

"This is the bottom part of a piece that's called A Woman Holding Desire. It's what I synthesized life to be: desire. And the desire, in this case, is coming from her heart. And this is the entire piece. It's six feet tall. It's hard to get it all in at once, but it's the spirit of desire which is pulling her through her life. In my case, the desire comes from my heart. I synthesized life as being about desire. I couldn't find anything else to call it. As you can see, everything's very abstract. It's the figure, but it's abstract. I hope you can see that."

Takeaway: Vaugel that her job as a sculptor was to learn from the past, then imbue it with personal authenticity and innovation to create the art of the future.

196 Vaugel, Woman Holding Desire, bottom half.

197 David Kelley

Art and Ideals by David Kelley

David Kelley has a funny face. It reminds me a little bit of Laurel from Laurel and Hardy. What's amusing is that when David listens, his face acts like a mime's. His eyes and eyebrows are especially expressive, running through or assessing every element of the speaker's talking points. It is quite extraordinary; I've never seen that level of physical reaction in the art of listening. It's completely natural, without a hint of artifice.

I mentioned earlier that I met David Kelley and his wife, Susan McCloskey, in 1985 at a conference in La Jolla. A few minutes' walk from the conference was the famous nude beach, Black's Beach. During the conference, we had one afternoon off, and several people went to Black's Beach. This was the first time I met the philosopher George Walsh. The stout man was buck naked, walking alongside a clothed David Kelley. I had seen them walking some distance away, heads slightly bowed in deep contemplation. It was palpable that they were probably discussing metaphysics or something similar. One article I knew Walsh from was Ayn Rand and the Metaphysics of Kant. Note: I don’t recall if I was nude or not.

Another personal interaction I had with David and Susan was when I was visiting them in their Poughkeepsie, New York, home. We had gone to a movie, and afterward, back at their home, they started to engage in a dissertation on the movie’s themes and meaning. I was surprised by the formality of it, as if we were still in a philosophical classroom. For me, the experience of art, as much as I love the aesthetics of it, has a major emotional component. It's about how you felt anger toward a character, sadness for a situation, how much you loved one of the characters, or even how beautiful they were. None of those elements came up while sitting around the kitchen table with them. However, their dissection of the intellectual elements in art was enlightening and fascinating to listen to.

I was honored that David agreed to speak at the conference. He has one of the greatest minds I know regarding human reasoning. When he starts to dissect arguments, I recall more than once thinking, "Thank God he’s a good person. Because if he were evil, he would be a devastating opponent in any argument."

I also recall watching David at a libertarian dinner party in Los Angeles, where his philosophical prowess was more than a match for anarchist hecklers. David had invited me as his guest, a gesture that spoke volumes of his respect for me. He gave a presentation to the very rowdy audience, after which he took questions. One libertarian questioned the necessity of government: "Why do we need government at all? If individuals haven't consented to its authority, why should we accept its imposition of laws and taxes?"

David, ever composed and articulate, addressed him. "I agree with a lot of what anarchists write about the inefficiency of government as a monopoly," he began, his voice cutting through the din of disagreeing voices. "But at the end of the day, if there is no ultimate court of appeal whose word is final on a given issue, you're not going to resolve it."

After highlighting the points that made his case, David's reasoning shifted the audience; the hecklers had become heckled themselves. The audience began to show more curiosity about his opinions, which were different from theirs. His ability to navigate complex philosophical issues with clarity and conviction was palpable—a testament to his commitment to reason and the foundations of individual rights.

After his presentation, I asked him why he was so reasonable with some of the hecklers. He said that by answering them in good faith, you are not only addressing them but also speaking to the whole audience who might have similar doubts.

David Kelley’s Talk

David Kelley's lecture, "Art and Ideals," offers a philosophical and historical overview of art's role in human culture, dating back to the earliest known artistic expressions. He begins by reflecting on the origins of art, music, and storytelling, noting their lack of direct survival value, yet highlighting their universality across human cultures. Kelley examines various theories that attempt to explain the purpose of art, from evolutionary psychology's idea of art as a display of excess fitness to deeper cognitive and emotional needs.

Kelley argues that art fulfills a vital role in human life by embodying abstract concepts and ideals in concrete forms. While abstractions like moral codes and philosophical writings can guide behavior, they often lack the immediacy and emotional resonance of artistic representations. Art, therefore, serves to re-embody these abstractions, making them tangible and emotionally impactful.

"To keep our abstractions tied to reality, we need to re-embody them in concrete forms, uniting the universality of the abstraction with the specificity and immediacy of experience... Art, in particular, is a powerful means of creating embodied abstractions... In art, we experience objects and worlds rich in meaning through the artist's work."

This function is particularly crucial for ideals, which need to be experienced vividly to have a motivational force in people's lives. He criticizes modern and postmodern art for neglecting the representation of ideals or treating them with irony and mocks popular art for oversimplifying them.

"Modernists have focused on formal aspects of art, often excluding content. Postmodernists have represented ideals in a mocking and ironic manner, while popular art has catered to the hunger for ideals with simple and sentimental templates."

Kelley calls for a return to art that skillfully and insightfully represents ideals, combining artistic innovation with the power to inspire and elevate.

"I hope that future art and artists will return to this timeless task. Our ideals deserve the skill of artists, the excitement of artistic innovation, and the power of ideals rendered insightfully."

Takeaway: Kelley highlights that art is the most important tool in illustrating ideals and abstraction that will resonate on visceral level.

Conclusion

The conference presented a compelling overview that our contemporary postmodern art culture is a dead end and that innovative, authentic, and reenergized figurative art is the future. I argued that for art to evolve, artists need to innovate figurative art in both content and means. Stephen Hicks brilliantly critiqued the failure of postmodern art to enrich the human experience and called for a new, fresh humanist approach to art. Jan Koenderink highlighted how advanced figurative art is in human perception and expressed his hopes that contemporary science and art will reengage more with visual perception in the future. Martine Vaugel, surveying her work, emphasized that humanist passion, intelligence, and innovation are the future of art. David Kelley argued that art is the ideal medium for expressing abstractions and ideals relevant to humanity. I am extraordinarily proud that these wonderful philosophers, scientists, and artists presented some of the most powerful arguments for a new renaissance in the arts.

198 Left to right: Michael Newberry, Martine Vaugel, and David Kelley.

Finally, a note of thanks to Lisa Thorne and Brett Holverstott who helped make the conference a success!

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