The New Beyond presented a series of monumental charcoal drawings by American artist Robert Longo, paying homage to the European pioneers of post-war art. This exhibition, which follows Longo’s 2014 series of drawings based on American Abstract Expressionism, explores the work of Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Arshile Gorky, Asger Jorn, Yves Klein, Willem de Kooning, Maria Lassnig, Piero Manzoni, Joan Mitchell, Pierre Soulages, Wols and Zao Wou-Ki. By revisiting their work in a contemporary context, Longo offered this exhibition as a ‘historical construction’, highlighting the continued influence of these artists and finding a present-day resonance in their ability through their work to transcend the fraught circumstances of a radically changing world. A perfect opportunity for a conversation with this world-renowned artist.

Mart Engelen: Why the title The New Beyond?

Robert Longo: The title comes from a 1952 essay called ‘A New Beyond’ by French art critic Michel Tapié. I changed it into ‘The New Beyond’. A lot of artists said, “Let’s begin again,” which is a kind of oxymoron. I think what happened is, I did an American Abstract show in 2014.

ME: I remember it.

RL: I needed to do that as an American and Thaddaeus saw the show and he said, “You should do the Europeans” and I said, “I don’t really know the Europeans”. What is interesting is that as an American—I lived in Paris for almost three years—I remember going to museums where I would see people making copies of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Cézanne. In America, classical art is abstract expressionism. American art doesn’t actually go further back. But I found out, simply by accident, that in 1940 they discovered the Lascaux cave paintings. So here is a period of time when they were discovering art before art—pre-art in a cave—at the beginning of the Second World War. The cave could also be a bomb shelter but at the same time it’s art; at the beginning of art.

Then you have this idea of progress: civilisation. Progress that becomes regression. Talking technology, we advanced so much to the point that we created atomic bombs. I knew that the Second World War was this kind of bizarre resetting of the clock and all these artists—the European artists—actually experienced the war whereas the American artists were at a distance. So I was fascinated that here were these guys trying to create a new art and at the same time they had just discovered art at the beginning. What was interesting at the end of the Second World War, and I found this fascinating, there was a kind of flow of artists.

ME: In Europe?

RL: In Europe, yes. There was a flow of artists coming in and out of Paris from all around the world. It was an interesting kind of movement. What also happened was that the new governments which were formed, in France for instance, were socialist. And what art goes with socialism? Social realism! So they didn’t want the abstract art. But the artists didn’t want representational art. They said we have seen enough of the shit. We want something freer! When I was doing the American show in 2014 there was something that blew me away. Something I didn’t know about was that the United States CIA organised a exhibition of all these American Abstract Expressionism artists that they sent to Europe and it was shown in Vienna, Berlin, I believe, and more cities. What they were doing was showing Abstract Expressionism as a propaganda tool. To show people in the East how free America was.

ME: Why, by the way, are many artists very cautious about using the word ‘political’ in their work?

RL: I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe they can’t spell it. [Laughs] I think a lot of artists try very hard to maintain a kind of formalist position. They want to leave interpretation open. For a lot of art—and I may be a little bit guilty—there are wall labels and there are stories and they go with the work. An artist likes people to come to the work and experience the work by itself. But at the same time in the age of coming after somebody like Walter Benjamin, who is so aware of the caption relationship to an image, you can’t ignore some of that stuff. When somebody comes to see this show, what would they think?

ME: When I saw your show in 2014, which I loved very much, I was thinking wow, it’s quite daring as a world-renowned artist to make your own interpretations in charcoal of famous paintings by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, etc. And now this exhibition, mainly about European master works in a Robert Longo charcoal translation. Please tell me more about the process, the exploration of these artists’ works in charcoal, and what it means to you.

RL: Well, these are like love letters to these artists. They are my heroes, they are my ancestors. These people built a foundation to help me know where I am. I think art is about figuring out where you are. Art is like philosophy or science; it’s about trying to understand something and it has the capacity to maybe understand the world even better—Walter Benjamin talks about this. And I think this work, which was made at the end of the Second World War, was an attempt to heal Europe. There was an incredible rejection of classical art, modernism, surrealism, picture-making. At the same time, they had picture-making in their head from classical art but with the idea that you make something so outside of art that art would have to pay attention to it. So what I did with these pictures was to joke about the idea that in America when something is big it’s good—I was aware of the scale of these paintings.

ME: They were small?

RL: They were very small. They were like easel paintings, so I decided to Americanise them by making them big. So what was interesting about making the Dubuffet so big was to see all the near crap and materials he used to make a painting.

ME: As I remember it you received, for example, X-rays of a Rembrandt painting from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the show in 2014. How was it this time?

RL: The same. I got permission from all the estates. I have seen most of these paintings but when I did the 2014 show I actually had access to the paintings so I took hundreds of photographs. I couldn’t access the ones for this show so easily, so the museums sent me hi-res photographs. So all these black-and-white drawings are made not from black-and-white images but from colour photographs. Because black-and-white photography is arbitrary: a dark red and a dark green look the same in black-and-white.

ME: That’s funny, yesterday in the hotel I saw an old documentary about Karel Appel and he explained, “I have four or five different kinds of black … read more