So Simple, Yet So Difficult to Arrive At

In Maxwell Hendler’s gray modern house, wedged between traditional bungalows in South Pasadena, the living room tells the whole story. On one wall hangs a 1982 watercolor of James Dean; on another, a 1985 orange-and-white-striped panel embellished with the word “gross” in black. Over the sofa hangs a 1987 white construction of pilasters and translucent fiberglass. Finally, in the corner, there is the most recent work, a 2002 rectangle of eye-tingling magenta.

This rough survey of Hendler’s paintings from the past 20 years chronicles a progressive embrace of simplicity. Gesturing at the white construction, Hendler says, “This is where I started losing imagery. I was trying to get to a kind of painting that keeps you from drifting into another world, the world of illusion.”

Since the late 1980s, Hendler has perfected his technique for producing paintings that simply embody color. A few weeks ago, his studio was crowded with rectangles of various dimensions, radiantly exemplifying chartreuse, aqua, cherry and ebony. They are now on view at the Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica.

Hendler, 63, is relieved to be having an exhibition. Last fall, he underwent hip replacement surgery. “It knocked me out for three months,” he says ruefully. “I didn’t think I would have my show this year. But in January, everything just fell together.”

Sturdily built and tanned, with gray hair and cognac eyes, Hendler has come from his morning session of water aerobics. Wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, he is only half-joking when he describes the hard physical labor required to make his paintings. He pours layers of intensely colored resin on panels of Masonite laid flat atop sawhorses. His challenge is to saturate the resin with enough pigment to attain electrifying intensity without breaking down the compounds. If he pours the color over a white resin background, it becomes slightly transparent. Otherwise, it’s opaque.

After he attains the desired hue, he sands the resin surface for hours with a hand-held machine and stacks of sandpaper graded from 100, the roughest, to 2,000, which feels like velvet. Then he buffs the surface with rubbing compound until the surface is as reflective as a mirror.

“The resin is surfboard technology,” he explains, “the rest is auto body technology.”

When finished, even the smallest panels weigh 50 pounds. He gives these paintings tantalizingly personal titles, such as the large, ocean blue “Hispanola” after the name of the ship in “Treasure Island.” Or “Au Contraire,” because Hendler thinks of chartreuse as an “in-between color.”

Over the past decade, these works have garnered raves from critics. They have “a simple readiness about them that defies all abstract pretension,” Dave Hickey wrote in Artforum, “a refined affability that reminds you, every time you look, that nothing in this world with a body and color is ever as simple as you think it is.”

Certainly Hendler’s journey to the current work was not simple. “When I was young, I sat and painted all day,” he says. “Now that I’m old, I’m doing this stuff that is physically demanding. I got it wrong somehow, but I’m compelled to do it. At this point, I don’t see an end to it.”

“Even as a child, I was Max the artist,” says Hendler, sitting on the sofa in his living room. Reared in Houston, he is the son of a construction estimator and a housewife. But his parents’ true passion was the stage, and both were involved in the founding of the Alley Theater. The family moved to South Pasadena, not far from Hendler’s current home, when he was 17. The following year, 1956, he enrolled in the art department at UCLA with thoughts of working in advertising. During his first year, he says, “it occurred to me that I didn’t want anybody to be my boss.”

Hendler graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1960 and married a classmate, Arleen. Then the newlyweds moved to New York City to be artists.

“We were overwhelmed,” admits Hendler. He worked for a printer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district, and at the end of one year, he says, “my painting was at rock bottom.”

The couple returned to L.A., rented a house on Venice Beach, and joined a community of artists that included Charles Garabedian and Billy Al Bengston. Hendler went back to UCLA, but ultimately left academia to paint on his own. Then he found himself spending as much time in the local pool hall as in the studio.

“It was a dark night of the soul,” he says now.

Around that time, his mother gave him a box of drawings that he’d made as a child. Leafing through them, he had an epiphany: “I remembered the spirit in which I worked as a child. From that moment until this, it hasn’t left me. I think at UCLA and in New York, I became overwhelmed by the greatness of art and art history.”

By 1965, Hendler was channeling his epiphany into one small painting of his neighbor David standing in front of beach cottages. The following year, he completed a 10-by-10-inch painting of his dining room. “I started painting in realistic mode and the inspiration stayed with me, to get enthralled with an idea and not lose it,” he remembers.

In 1967 he spent a year painting the television set in his cozy living room, then spent two years on a painting of beer bottles. These pictures--not more than a foot square--were intensely detailed, partly inspired by northern Renaissance art.

Meanwhile, Hendler began teaching in the Cal State system and had two daughters, Cara and Emmanuelle. With the added distractions, it took him six years to complete his tour de force, the 10-by-12-inch “Sandpainting.”

“For years, I sat at a table painting from a still life of beach sand, bits of asphalt, kelp bulbs and a Kleenex box.” Over and over, he scraped the surface down and painted it again, creating depth and dimension. “The sand painting became a bas-relief as well as illusion; it came alive,” he recalls.

Two of these five intense paintings were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s show “22 Realists” in 1970. In 1975, all of them made up a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At that moment, however, Hendler chose to quit his about-to-be-tenured teaching job at Cal State Long Beach, leave his family and start a new life in Northern California. “I felt I had to get away from it all,” he says.

Divorced and floating from Berkeley to Mendocino, mostly living in an RV, he painted and sold modest watercolors: redwoods, rural landscapes and still lifes.

Then in 1982, he moved back to L.A. “After five years, I had a need of people again,” he said. “I thought of all my friends in L.A. and I thought I needed to get back to them and to my daughters, who were then in junior high and high school.”

After his return, he says, “the work became Pop-y.” He began translating some of his watercolors into large-scale oil paintings, beginning with the portrait of James Dean that now hangs in his living room. He also painted the logo from a candy box and from Israeli bubble gum.

The logos gave way to paintings of words such as “gross” in 1985. He selected “words that would in some sense dissolve and not lead outside themselves in meaning.” Along the way, the pictures grew more reductive. “The imagery flattened, reduced and simplified itself. I started to concentrate on the backgrounds,” he says.

Before the backgrounds took over as the entire picture, however, Hendler did a series of architectural constructions using wooden pilasters and corrugated fiberglass in 1987. He liked the look of the fiberglass, which led him to pour lightly pigmented resin on clear pine boards, so the grain of the wood could be seen beneath the tint. “I was fascinated by the fact that I could create this transparency,” he says. “That just haunted me, the idea of looking through.”

Since those experiments, he has continued to construct monochrome panels with various levels of transparency. A few years ago, he began the opaque monochromes.

Now, when Hendler summarizes his trajectory to pure color, it’s all about freedom.

He says he got lost in the world of the little paintings. “The more I painted the same quarter inch over and over, the more real it became,” he says.

Then, slowly, “I liberated myself out of the painting and into the world. The things I’m making now, they live in my space; I don’t live in their space.”

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a regular contributor to Calendar.

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“MAXWELL HENDLER,” Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B7, Santa Monica. Dates: Through June 22. Admission: Free. Phone: (310) 449-1479.