News: The art visionary

Miami Herald: The art visionary
Painter and professor Darby Bannard, a leader in the 1960s minimalist movement, wowed Warhol and art critics the world over with his abstract work. Now 76, Bannard, a professor of art at the University of Miami, hopes to inspire the next wave of artists

By Howard Cohen
hcohen@MiamiHerald.com
Countless people collected pop artist Andy Warhol — one collector paid $100 million for Warhol’s 1963 canvas, Eight Elvises.

But the celebrated Warhol once focused his attention on Darby Bannard, a leader in the 1960s Minimalist art movement. Bannard, now a University of Miami art professor who has guided many graduate students toward careers in art, will never forget the strange man with the snow white hair who bought some of his paintings.

“I told him, ‘Oh, Andy, it’s great that you like my paintings.’ ”

Warhol’s response wasn’t quite what Bannard, then a young Princeton grad, expected.

“Oh, I just bought them for investment,” Warhol told him.

So much for 15 minutes of fame. No matter, Bannard has had decades.

“He was such a geek anyway,” Bannard, 76, laughs in his studio on the second floor of a UM art building near the baseball stadium.

The space is Bannard’s retreat, a large room with paint-flecked cement floors, an old desk and a couple of tattered hard back chairs tucked away in a corner.

Bannard isn’t here to sit. Instead, he escapes upstairs for three hours every evening to paint after teaching class. Large canvas abstract paintings in various degrees of completion rest against one wall, splashed and scratched with vivid colors, while a huge white canvas lies flush on the floor awaiting the artist’s imagination and deft touch.

More than 400 bottles of paint, along with brushes and boxes of memorabilia, including a stash of his beloved old 45-rpm records of classic soul, share space in Bannard’s studio.

“I come into this place and all of the bull---- stays out, like a film coming off me,” Bannard said. “It’s work making art, an awful lot of anxiety and pressure to get it right and self-criticism built into it. I can’t live without it. I paint and paint because I love it and when I don’t paint — every year I take a couple months off — I get very cranky.”

Art lovers can see the result of his passion, along with paintings from six of his past and present graduate students who form the core of The Miami School program, at the Center for Visual Communication in Northwest Miami. The exhibit runs through March 8.

The exhibit is new but it’s built on living history — Bannard’s — though he’s reluctant to take too many bows.

“It’s a very good show of abstract painters and they are all students of mine, so it was easy to put a show like that together, but I never thought of myself as ‘I’m the leader’ kind of thing,” he said. “In 20 years I’ve had so many graduate students who have gone out there and become very good exhibiting painters all over the country. In Miami, they are teaching at all the schools and working at museums. I feel there’s a certain pervasiveness I can lay claim to but I don’t want to get into a big ego thing.”

Others can sing Bannard’s praises.

“He directs you to where you could potentially be,” said graduate student Brian Gefen, 28 who will complete his studies this semester with Bannard and then move to New York to pursue a painting career. “He’s very good about looking at your painting and seeing what it could be potentially.”

George Bethea, one of Bannard’s graduate students 20 years ago, now operates a studio in South Miami and still visits Bannard every 10 days or so to work on projects together. Bethea, 50, will also exhibit at the Abstract Miami show.

“He has a great eye that could look at your painting without projecting any criteria of how it should be, but to look at the painting and recognize its quality. For the past 20 years we’ve developed a close friendship. I go to his studio when he finishes his paintings and we’ll crop them.”

Bannard has come a long way from the days of youth when he blew up a friend in his New Jersey basement — and, no, not on canvas.

The memory of that experiment still makes the professor laugh.

“When I was young, I was very into science. I had my own lab in our cellar and did traditional things like make things blow up, which stopped when I blew up one of my friends. It didn’t really hurt him but it took his hair and eyebrows off. His parents and my father got upset. Dad was all confused. He didn’t know what was harmful and what wasn’t and had to question every time I made a purchase. ‘Is this going to blow up?’ Then I went away to school and ran into real physics and, whew, that’s too much work. I want to play. The art thing took over.”

Bannard discovered he had talent early.

“As a kid, I was sort of a prodigy. When I was 6, I was drawing realistic pictures of birds. We lived on this big farm and I’d go find birds and draw them. I was very intense about that. I’ve written all my life about art.”

Bannard, who champions technique and craft above all else, has had some 300 pieces published about art over the years and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1968.

“Without craft, you can’t have expression. It stops right there. When I went to Princeton my father told me I should be a lawyer because I could always out argue him. I went to the LSAT and saw all these guys I didn’t care for and I said, ‘No!’ I’m going to New York and will be a starving artist.”

Bannard would soon make his move pay off as he spearheaded, along with Frank Stella, the Minimalism movement in the late 1950s.

“He was very prescient. He seems to anticipate minimalism. Early on, when he was at Princeton, he was friendly with Michael Fried and Frank Stella,’’ said Karen Wilkin, a curator and art critic. “These are people who helped change what our conceptions of what abstract art can be and Darby was very much a part of that.”

Piri Halasz, author of A Memoir of Creativity: Abstract Painting, Politics and the Media, 1956-2008 (iUniverse; $40) also remembers a “trailblazer who anticipated the whole Minimalist movement of the ‘60s” when, as arts writer for Time, she featured Western Air III, one of his oil paintings, in the Feb. 7, 1969 issue of the magazine.

“I came to be friendly with Darby in the ‘70s and followed his career,’’ Halasz said. “He’s a wonderful painter and a great teacher. He started a whole little school in Miami of artists who see things the way he does and who make beautiful paintings,” she said from New York.

After 20 years at UM, Bannard, a father of two grown sons, has adjusted to the world of academia.

“I didn’t know a section from a credit,” he joked about his first day on campus.

Now, he wants to help the next generation of Bannards find their place in the art world.

“I know how to tell them, ‘This is good, do this, do that’ without being dictatorial. The better students are always willing to try anything. They want to make art their life and when you get a student who is really talented it’s a real joy. I suffer for them when they don’t do well,” he laughs.