Molly Warnock on the art of Chryssa

SPEAKING AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY in January 1968, the artist Chryssa detailed a disposition toward creative practice that she described as the “cool mind.”¹ The term served to telegraph, via contrast, her disdain for certain endeavors aimed at bridging art and life—all of which, in her view, simply reproduced the disordered flux of the “human pattern.” Of particular concern was what she cast as the fundamentally regressive credo of Happenings, with their freewheeling yet ultimately pointless amalgams of things and deeds: “Let us let things happen.” The cool mind makes things happen, eschewing “Surrealism, Dada, and psychological extensions” so as to elaborate “new logics.” Informed by her experience as an early adopter of new media and a creator of works that required collaboration, this stance was necessarily alert to both the promises and the constraints of emerging technologies and industrial materials. Yet Chryssa consistently underscored the need for a wholly lucid impelling vision, one that would allow the artist to remain aloof from potentially enthralling novelties—to control and not simply be controlled by them. The cool mind, she emphasized, “goes beyond the limits of technology and of the material and is independent of both.”

These were the reflections of an artist at the height of her powers. Born in Athens in 1933, Chryssa lived briefly in Paris and San Francisco before settling in the late ’50s in Manhattan, where she occupied a studio residence near Union Square. She quickly made a name for herself, participating in a number of group exhibitions from 1960 on and garnering major solo presentations at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery, Pace Gallery, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among other venues. By the late ’60s, she was broadly recognized as a groundbreaking figure in the field of light art, her reputation centered on the neon sculptures she had begun making around 1962 and cemented by her recently completed magnum opus The Gates to Times Square, 1964–66. Laboriously constructed over a two-year period and exhibited at Pace shortly after its completion, the massive work—a ten-foot cube, complexly layered and transected, in welded stainless steel, cast aluminum, neon, and Plexiglas—was at the time of her NYU lecture installed on a dais at Grand Central Terminal. It would subsequently travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and to the São Paulo Bienal before entering the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). She continued to exhibit widely throughout the ’70s and in 1982 was awarded an important survey at the Albright-Knox. Yet her profoundly innovative oeuvre, so celebrated in its own day, was in recent decades all but forgotten. Key works languished in storage, and one—a neon sculpture originally created for Documenta 4—was even demolished by its holding institution in the face of prohibitive restoration costs.

Chryssa’s first North American survey in more than forty years, which debuted at Dia Chelsea in March and opens this month at Houston’s Menil Collection, is therefore a genuine event. Expertly curated by Megan Holly Witko and Michelle White, “Chryssa & New York” focuses on the artist’s formative early tenure in the city. Sixty-two objects from 1955 to around 1975 track her enduring engagement with Times Square in particular: Fascinated by systems of mass communication, she was drawn both to the glowing marquees and to the fact that the New York Times and other media organizations were headquartered there. An excellent catalogue encompasses new scholarship, an in-depth examination of the conservation of the neon work, and a detailed chronology. As this volume makes clear, numerous histories flow through the art on view: narratives of Greekness and Americanness; of gender and queerness; of technological innovation and obsolescence. Yet there is also value in staying close to the exhibition, which offers a particularly rich opportunity to reappraise her art.

The inspired presentation seemed attuned to the continuities as well as the ruptures of an oeuvre oriented virtually from the beginning to both light and language.

THE DIA SURVEY plunged visitors directly into an encounter with Chryssa’s signature sculptures, devoting the first of its two large exhibition spaces to her work with neon technology. Here was The Gates to Times Square, on view in New York City for the first time in more than fifty years. The second half of the exhibition focused on the enigmatic artworks, mostly reliefs of various sorts, that she began making in the years immediately following her arrival in New York. Exiting the show required retracing one’s steps. Returning visitors to the neon gallery with a new understanding of the deep context, this inspired presentation seemed attuned to the profound continuities as well as the no less significant ruptures of an oeuvre oriented virtually from the beginning to both light and language.

After the electric color and omnipresent hiss of the pieces in the first space, the early objects appeared altogether alien, bleached, and hushed. Most were monochromatic or nearly so, in neutral and metallic tones dictated by Chryssa’s preferred materials: plaster, terra-cotta, aluminum, bronze. Yet despite this initially startling difference, these works provided crucial indexes to an emerging philosophy that would shape her practice as a whole. Eschewing autographic marking, Chryssa privileges iterative procedures of casting, printing, and stamping that necessarily distance the hand. Precisely in so doing, however, she identifies iteration with intentionality.

Installed near the entrance of Dia’s second room were the earliest objects on view, the “Cycladic Books,” which Chryssa produced primarily between 1955 and 1962. As she later recounted to I. M. Pei, she began the series one day when, in the course of casting other elements, she accidentally poured plaster into an ordinary cardboard box. Curious about the result, she opened the container the next day to discover a “somewhat T-shaped image that has some of the same geometric qualities of Cycladic sculpture.”² Tellingly, where the reference is clearly to Cycladic figurines, she grasped the result as essentially textual: something like a found book, struck with a single graphemic form. Converting sheer serendipity into serial practice, she then repeated the process with countless other cartons and an expanding array of sculptural materials, yielding rectangular slabs imprinted with the subtly varied traces of different configurations of folds and flaps. Mature iterations, such as the twenty plaster “Books” from 1957, presented horizontally in long vitrines or three additional examples in marble, all 1957–62/1997, displayed on an angled, lectern-like pedestal, appeared essentially as supports for the phantom inscriptions of ever-shifting patterns of shadow. From here, it was but a short step to the diverse array of reliefs with considerably more marked depths and intervals (and in many cases, explicit letterforms) that she began making just a bit later than her initial “Books.”

A second turning point, as decisive as the cardboard casts, was represented by works at the opposite end of the same long gallery. There, the cast-aluminum Newspaper Sculpture (One Page of Classified Ads), 1963, suggested a Cycladic Book rearticulated through an additional act of imprinting—one that, in this case, was explicitly figured as machinelike. The work belongs to a larger body of objects (including the first paintings of her New York period), mostly produced between 1959 and 1962, that Chryssa created by pressing various supports with discarded linotype printing plates (or, according to some accounts, stamps produced from such plates) that had been used in newspaper production. For the oil-on-paper Car Tires, 1959–62, the artist repeated an individual advertisement in a gridded array. It’s surely not incidental that the titular product is an O-like form, a found letter-object in its own right. Other paintings on canvas—for example, Newspaper II and Newspaper No. 3, both 1961—find her using the plates to lay down text in large blocks, at times superimposing multiple impressions. These works translate the formless passages of shade at stake in her reliefs into the light-dark modulations of print on print. The result is an allover density of linguistic imagery in which individual letters give way to a generalized buzzing or burgeoning—the linguistic ground of everyday life.

WITHIN THIS BLURRED GRAY WORLD, neon emerges as the vehicle of a newly marked artistic agency. Here, installed among the Newspaper works, we found Chryssa’s initial forays into neon technology, the 1960 Classified and the closely related, undated Les Toyota sales. In both paintings, the stamped area is confined to a roughly central rectangular field, and in each case, the eponymous word or phrase has been painted, either in whole or in part, in large uppercase letters above or below that block. Pale-blue neon serves to highlight specific fragments: the terminal FIED of CLASSIFIED, the LES of SALES. (The latter additionally presages the rotation and reversal of some of the elements in her later signage works: TOYOTA SALES is upside down, but the neon LES appears right side up, as if assuming the role of the French plural article.) Distanced from the surface by tube supports, these refulgent partial reiterations cut themselves out decisively against the paintings’ deep-blue grounds.³ They appear as veritable emblems of the artist’s cool mind, visual metaphors for her own capacity for detachment and projection.⁴

Yet where neon offered Chryssa a set of figuratively resonant analogues to the self-possessed intentionality described in her 1968 lecture, that same technology also imposed a seemingly endless panoply of new challenges. It was not simply that she had to learn to design forms that would allow for an uninterrupted flow of gas, a point that she explicitly singled out as a defining difficulty. In a more general sense, she now found herself importantly dependent upon a host of other minds and hands and forced to act accordingly—for example, “endlessly readapting my drawings for the glassblower so that my final work will dominate the limitations of the new techniques.” As the NYU text emphatically declares, “WITH THE NEW MEDIA A NEW APPROACH TO THE TERM ‘ORIGINAL THOUGHT’ IS ESTABLISHED.” This newness had to do not just with material and technical realities but with interpersonal ones, as well.⁵

Unlike the mythical protagonist of American action painting, Chryssa begins not with a blank canvas or a metaphysical void but with a concrete fragment of the material world.

Of particular interest, in this respect, are a number of neon sculptures that, like the “Cycladic Books” and the Newspaper works before them, draw impetus from a cache of found objects—or, more precisely, of cast-off language: the disused metal signage, always featuring words and letters, that Chryssa recuperated at various sites around New York. In a new twist, the scavenged items are literally incorporated into the completed works, rather than used to create impressions or stamps as with the linotype plates. Chopped into fragments and combined with additional, specially fabricated elements in complex assemblages, they are explicitly positioned as so many starting points for an iterative process that now spans materials and technologies, each link in the chain acquiring significance relative to the others.

The earliest such works at Dia were both wall-hung reliefs. The first, Times Square Sky, 1962, establishes a basic opposition between the unruly physicality of the hulking metal remnants and the ethereal quality of cool-blue neon. Confined to the upper right of an otherwise packed landscape of cursive-letter forms, a single length of tubing spells out AIR. The multipanel Americanoom, 1963, is a more complex case: Here, a particular set of fragments—some, such as OOM or NEW, are legible, whereas others verge on abstract meanders—have been fabricated both in cast metal and in neon. Reading from left to right, in accordance with the conventions of Western writing, the three-part sequence from found relief to flat metal cutout to colored neon script suggests first a controlled rematerialization on Chryssa’s own terms (note the displacement of the notched O of OOM from the first position in the found fragment to the second position in the cutout), followed by a no less disciplined distillation into glowing line. That the neon elements cycle through timed intervals of illumination and darkness adds still another dimension of authorial choice.

These works instantiate a distinctive engagement with the found object, one that is visibly responsive to dominant aesthetic trends of the later ’50s and early ’60s even as it stands apart from them. Unlike the mythical protagonist of American action painting (or the cognate discourses she could have encountered in Paris), Chryssa begins not with a blank canvas or a metaphysical void but with a concrete fragment of the material world. True to the terms of her 1968 lecture, however, she refuses “Surrealism, Dada, and psychological extensions.” Chryssa had known key members of the Surrealist group during her time in Paris and later credited them with helping to expand her concept of art; yet her targeted repurposing of select sign elements is antithetical to the associative thrust of Surrealist assemblage and its many offshoots, flatly rejecting “automatism of every sort or unconscious overt drives of every sort, sadistic, masochistic, etc.” Nor can it be reconciled with the pseudosociological transcription of the real that Pierre Restany saw as the beating heart of Nouveau Réalisme (however strongly the French critic advocated for her art).⁶ On the contrary, her iterative procedures progressively distance the objects in question from the untransformed dross of the given, subjecting her finds to the imaginative but not aleatory play of transformation and displacement proper to the cool mind.

It is in The Gates to Times Square that this iterative model finds paradigmatic expression. Composed of four distinct vertical sections separated by slight gaps, the work demands to be studied from all angles, and the installation at Dia gave it plenty of breathing room. Coming upon it initially, one was likely to be struck primarily by the hieratic facade, a bisected capital A flanked by aluminum wings. It was only on returning to the sculpture after making my way through the show’s second large gallery that I realized Chryssa’s crowning achievement is best read from the back, where the artist archived the catalytic fragments in two Plexiglas boxes.

The entire work was projected from this inauspicious jumble of discarded elements. (The fragments’ bright-red interiors underscore their importance: The color commands the gaze.) The vertical section second closest to a viewer looking at the work from the rear contains the refabricated cast-metal forms at slightly larger dimensions than those of the found originals, now spreading out to fill both halves of the upright gridded armature. Each cast volume is presented in a layered and welded composite, the repetition registering—paradoxically—as at once machinelike and deeply meant. Just behind the A facade are the refabricated elements in icy-blue neon, the glowing symbols thrust forward from their respective transformers by supertall tube supports. Traversing diverse operational strata, iteration offers proof of the cool mind’s hard-won autonomy, its fidelity to an overarching idea—however continually readapted in the face of material and technical contingency. And indeed, capping off that frontal A, Chryssa has included the templates that guided her throughout this process, effectively bringing us back to her motor powers of conception and translation. Rolled and placed at a reserve in twinned acrylic containers, the paper patterns at once answer to and transcend the found fragments that set this process in motion, ready and waiting to be unfurled anew.

Iteration offers proof of the cool mind’s autonomy, its fidelity to an overarching idea—however continually readapted in the face of contingency.

ALL OF THIS SUGGESTS an essentially Apollonian sensibility. The curator and critic Gordon Brown, summarizing Chryssa’s NYU lecture in Arts Magazine in the spring of 1968, related her emphasis on “measure and control” to the ancient Greeks (a reference doubtless inflected by the artist’s own Greek heritage), but to my eye, much of her mature production recalls the far more recent precedent of Matisse, whose cutouts had been the subject of an expansive survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961.⁷ (Consider, for example, Chryssa’s inclusion of a “negative” symbol that appears to have been excised from a blue neon surround in Five Variations on the Ampersand, 1966; such forms are among the mainstays of Matisse’s late art.) Chryssa shares with Matisse an interest in what the catalogue for the latter’s MoMA exhibition calls “the quintessential and the universal,” but she reimagines the extreme distillation of the cutouts in terms of the new union of line and color enabled by neon tubing.⁸

Nonetheless, one work in particular opens onto darker—as it were, Dionysian—forces. Study for the Gates #14 (Clytemnestra) from “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripides is one of two sculptures in freestanding neon, both from 1967, that are nominally preparatory to The Gates to Times Square but in fact followed it chronologically. (The other, Study for the Gates #15 [a flock of morning birds from “Iphigenia in Aulis” by Euripides], was also displayed at Dia.) In this case, the letter-like silhouette has an avowedly anthropomorphic derivation, referred by the artist to a specific moment in a then-recent performance of the titular play in which the actress Irene Papas, interpreting Clytemnestra, “twists her body into a shocked S and screams.” The fragile black tubing, which glows deep purple when illuminated, has a nakedly vulnerable quality, even as the tubes are thicker—more bodily, so to speak—than those in the sculptures enclosed in Plexiglas boxes. Exposure had always been a dimension of Chryssa’s work, of course; what is offered to light is given equally to darkness, and her constant ruminations on control are equally reflections on all the ways it might be lost. Now, with Clytemnestra, that finitude attains an explicitly tragic dimension. Chryssa would iterate this object for the next thirty years.

Molly Warnock is the author of Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Penn State University Press, 2020).

NOTES

1. “A Lecture by Chryssa Given on January 10, 1968, at New York University,” in Chryssa & New York, ed. Megan Holly Witko, Sophia Larigakis, and Michelle White (New York: Dia Art Foundation; Houston: Menil Collection, 2023): 26–39. This is a lightly edited version of a text previously available only at the Archives of American Art; citations refer to the Dia/Menil publication.

2. “Conversation between I. M. Pei and Chryssa,” in Chryssa Cityscapes, ed. Douglas Schultz (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 47.

3. Chryssa’s 1968 lecture states that the dark-gray Plexiglas she had adopted in her neon boxes “resembles night”; the deep-blue grounds of Classified and Les Toyota sales may already have carried that connotation.

4. Already in 1968, discussing Chryssa’s neon boxes in the catalogue for the artist’s second solo exhibition at Pace, critic Diane Waldman noted Chryssa’s interest in revealing “the physical structure of the neons,” adding, “In a psychological way, the exposed mechanism functions as the ‘brain’ of the image” (Chryssa: Selected Works 1955–1967 [New York: Pace Gallery, 1968], 7). (Such foregrounding of the apparatus, Waldman went on to suggest, had become less psychological and more “formal” over time.) In taking certain features of the neon elements as visual metaphors for “cool-mindedness” (over and above some more general brainlikeness), I mean to advance a less mechanistic concept more attuned to Chryssa’s consistent emphasis on authorial intention.

5. Early commentators describe Chryssa’s at times fractious relationships with fabricators in ways that often read as inflected both by the artist’s gender and by her Greekness, as when Sam Hunter, in his 1974 monograph (the first on Chryssa’s art), introduces her to readers as “a dark, handsome, and mercurial woman . . . known as an artist who can make strong workmen and artisan assistants blanch by her eruptions of cold fury, especially when some fabricated sculpture element she ordered does not meet her exact specifications” (Chryssa [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974], 5). Intended as a gloss on the artist’s perfectionism, this portrait equally reminds us just how incongruous her presence likely seemed to many of her collaborators and consultants in the predominantly white male art world of the moment (another reason, it is permitted to think, why she sought so ardently to rise above—as opposed to simply reproduce—the already existing “human pattern”).

6. Restany included Chryssa in “Le Nouveau Réalisme,” an exhibition of both French and American artists, at the Galerie Rive Droite in 1961; he also wrote a monograph on her art (Chryssa [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977]) as well as the preface to her first institutional survey in France (“Le verre se fait livre,” in Chryssa: œuvres récentes Chryssa [Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1979], n.p.).

7. Gordon Brown, “The Cool Mind: Notes on Neon from Chryssa,” Arts Magazine 42, no. 5 (March 1968), 40.

8. Monroe Wheeler, The Last Works of Henri Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961): 9.