Irving Petlin’s Haunted Visions of History

Between the early 1960s and his death in 2018, Irving Petlin established himself as both an artist and an activist. He began hitting his stride in the turbulent ’60s, working with such organizations as the Artists Protest Committee in Los Angeles and the Art Workers Coalition in New York. He confronted a wide range of issues by taking part in Civil Rights and antiwar protests, as well as making a painting about the 1962 Charonne massacre in Paris and working on a poster addressing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, without taking a one one-size-fits-all approach. For him, art was not the only vehicle for change.

In 1970, Petlin, along with Frazer Dougherty and Jon Hendricks, all three members of the Artists’ Poster Committee of the Art Workers Coalition, were instrumental in publishing a now-famous poster with the text: “Q. And Babies? A. And Babies.” Its accompanying image, a photograph of bloodied Vietnamese women and children lying dead on a path, was taken by army photographer Ron Haeberle, while the phrase “And babies,” printed in red letters above and beneath the bodies, came from a news interview with an American soldier, Paul Meadlo, who participated in the slaughter. In 2006, I interviewed Petlin. When I asked him to speak about this poster, he said: 

There was always this dispute when we did the posters — what are we aiming at? You aim at other people, not the artists who think like you, but people you can move, and perhaps change. All the posters were based on the concept that they were for the outside; they were to be distributed democratically and put into the public space. We never signed those posters because we didn’t want people to hold onto them, we wanted them out on the walls.

The Artists’ Poster Committee relied on verifiable data to reveal information the United States government had suppressed in order to mislead the public about the Vietnam War’s progress. The Artists’ Poster Committee published and freely distributed 50,000 of the My Lai posters. 

Petlin took a different tack in his oil paintings, pastels, and drawings — on view at Art Paris from April 3 through 6 — refraining from direct depictions of brutality, suffering, and physical pain. Instead, he turned to symbolism, metaphor, and memory, as well as allusions to well-known works by James Ensor and Odilon Redon, and his own imagination, to convey a world where savagery and distress are rampant. Inspired by writers and poets, many of whom were his friends, Petlin’s work was haunted by his awareness of history, particularly the Holocaust, which he told me gave him “a certain Jewish nervousness and sensitivity.” His art evoked a world populated by ghosts and spirits who have yet to find rest. 

Talking about his lifelong friendship with the artist Leon Golub, whom he met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he received his BFA in 1956, Petlin said: “My work was never as polemical as Leon’s, but the subtext was always there. That subtext is what periodically comes out now.” It is this subtext that I want to consider. I think Petlin’s refusal to be overtly polemical has contributed to his under-recognition in the art world. The long-held assumption that political art must be both polemical and confrontational is borne out by the success of artists like Golub and his wife, Nancy Spero, rather than subtler artists like Petlin.

Born and raised in Chicago, Petlin began studying at SAIC in 1952 at the age of 17, though he received a youth scholarship to take classes at the school when he was 13. He was at least a decade younger than Golub, Spero, and other artists associated with the Monster Roster. Unlike many of these artists, who had fought in World War II, Petlin was visited by the legacy of his family and the larger history to which they belonged: displaced immigrants, generational trauma, the effects of fervid nationalism, colonialism, and genocide. The son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, 49 relatives on his father’s side had been killed at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka. He brought his sensitivity to history’s waves of hatred and returning tides of grief, and the individual’s relationship to them, into his work without ever focusing on his own story. 

Petlin is difficult to categorize, partly because he did something that few other politically committed artist have done — he turned inward rather than commenting on the state of the world. He scrutinized everything through the lens of his beloved Symbolists, particularly Redon, and writers such as the Egyptian-born French poet Edmund Jabes; the Martinican poet, philosopher, and literary critic Edouard Glissant; and the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, who described landscapes as if they were clouds that stealthily moved and shifted, because he recognized that all things are on the brink of dissolution. This is what Petlin shares with the great Polish writer — they depict defenseless worlds. In his large, four-panel painting “The Burning of Los Angeles” (1965–67), named after a painting described in Nathaniel West’s great, scornful novel about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust (1939), Petlin depicts Black men enveloped in yellow flames, an insufferable inferno. He completed the work in Los Angeles six months before the Watts Rebellion.

Through his use of colored dust from pastels and thinned paint, with which he stained the canvas, Petlin conjures a dreamlike world. Between 1969 and 1977, he made one painting a year in a series titled Rubbings from the Calcium Garden, landscapes framed by an oval ring composed of various materials soaked in paint and pressed against the canvas. Nebulous figures with malleable bodies populate the images, seemingly stuck in their calcifying bodies. His technique — one of many ways that he applied paint to the canvas — recalls the use of decalcomania by Max Ernst and Oscar Dominguez, a method of transferring an image or paint from one surface to another.

Petlin’s allegorical vision can pulse with rage or tenderness, yet grief and loss are also palpable. The panoramic cityscape “La Seine (In Sleep)” (1996) depicts the river beneath a yellow sky tinged with red. It is as if we are standing on a rooftop looking at the river spread out in front of us, with its bridges, including Pont Neuf, as well as Ile de la Cité, the site of the earliest settlement in Paris. The view is not nostalgic; it is a reminder that we are the latest witnesses to a world that will continue without us.

This sense of history as a repository of ghosts and sediment, a collision of past and present, resists reductive readings. It is also the subject of the panoramic pastel “The Nile (For Sarah)” (2012), rendered on two sheets of handmade paper the color of sand or raw linen. A pair of lightly sketched heads are visible on the left sheet, while in the lower left-hand corner, we see Petlin’s allusion to Redon’s “The Mysterious Boat” (1892). Petlin has transformed this enigmatic symbol of hope and reconciliation into a potent one of his own. (An exhibition focusing on this bond between Petlin and Redon is long overdue.) Elsewhere in the pastel, dark yellow triangular shapes suggest the sails of feluccas, their hulls invisible beneath the river.  

In the largely yellow vertical painting “Second of four mountains” (2001), a view of a medieval French street is quartered by the perpendicular bars of a window. As with the Rubbings from the Calcium Garden series, as well as “La Seine (In Sleep)” and “The Nile (For Sarah),” “Second of four mountains” shows a world to which we are connected, yet seems to lay beyond our reach. The faint profiles of horses float above a woman on the left, while a barely visible face lingers in front of her. She walks down an empty cobblestone street that vanishes in the distance. We are always surrounded by the ghosts of history. Who will remember us when we are gone?