Meet Artist Norman Gorbaty
The header of this blog includes the picture “Torah” by Norman Gorbaty, also shown above. A swirling vortex of energy, emanating perhaps from the tallitot (prayer shawls) embracing the Torah, sweeps through and around the sacred scroll. Perhaps the pulsations are those of the tallitot wearers, who are spinning so fast that we cannot even see them. A reciprocal vibration is generated within the Torah itself. Is that one Torah or many in the image? Is there perhaps only one person praying or are there many? Is each, Torah and the one praying, being birthed into a multiplicity of dimensions of themselves by the other?
Gorbaty grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Eastern European immigrants. His father was a carpenter, as were his three uncles and his grandfather. Yiddish was both the language and the culture of home. He studied art at Amherst College and Yale University School of Art and Architecture. At Yale he studied with painter Joseph Albers, who initiated him into art as magic-making, and with architect Louis Kahn, who taught him about the beauty of a brick. Upon graduation Gorbaty, by then married to Joy, decided to forego a career in fine art for one as a graphic artist in the advertising world, working for the firm Benton&Bowles. He taught advanced graphic design at Cooper Union. In the evenings, he would repair to his studio at home and create paintings, pastels, sculptures and more. After Joy died in 2003, Gorbaty decided to devote himself full time to his art. You can view his work at www.normangorbaty.com.
Below is an interview with Norman Gorbaty. It consists of edited excerpts from an interview I conducted with him on December 8, 2016 and selections from comments he has included in published accounts of his work. I invite you to meet Norman Gorbaty. ~ Rabbi Steven Moskowitz
You’ve said that you don’t make a picture, that you “do” a picture. What does that mean? It’s about movement. I am fascinated by the motion around us and often try to capture this in my work. There is movement in life as we “do” it. Everything moves. Images are constantly in motion. This movement combines with our differing perspectives of an image to create unique experiences that I artistically explore. It is the doing of the work that I am about. Somebody may buy and own a picture I’ve done, but only I own the doing.
You studied with Joseph Albers, who had taught at the Bauhaus in Germany alongside other great artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. What did you learn from him? From Albers I learned that in art one plus one can equal four. He got us thinking about the magic of art. We learned to see what we could not have seen before. To see the magic of color and form and how they affect each other, through our own eyes. With color and shaping you could move things back and forth on a canvass. I learned this from the Italian Futurists also: even when everything has stopped, it’s moving. The world is moving. You’re on this ball that’s moving around. When you walk past a tree, the tree is moving. As things turn, they become something else. The wonder of it all!
Louis Kahn would sometimes take breaks from his lectures in the school of architecture. He would come down to the basement to schmooze with the design and art students. He said we were dreamers and more receptive to what he was about than most of the architecture students. I learned about the doing from looking at a brick and asking of it what it wants to be. About a life being born in the doing. About giving integrity to that which is being born, to hear what it wants to be, to honor it, to have dialogue with that which is being created, simply to be able to talk with it.
When you start working on a piece, do you have in mind its completed image? Bernard Chaet taught drawing and painting at Yale. From him I learned what a simple line could create. He would correct our drawings with one mark here, a scratch there. They would come alive. We were so naïve. We thought it was not him but his special pencil. We would run out to the nearest art store to get that exact pencil. Alas, in the hands of beginners the pencil would not perform. The magic was not in the pencil but in Bernie. Till this day, when doing an image I hear Bernie in the background sounding his point of view. I make a mark. That mark tells me where the next mark should go and so on until the piece begins to have a life of its own. It begins to tell me what it wants to be. It is for me to recognize what it wants to be and help it become that.
What provides you with a measure of the worth of your work? Does it come entirely from within you, from the price placed on it, from the number of people who want to view it? When I was young, art was art; that’s all. I came to understand that it’s also a business. There was a time when Albers was really upset because while his paintings were selling for $80,000 apiece, Mondrian was getting $90,000. In the end, Albers was just a regular guy. Look, if somebody wants to see your work, it makes you feel good. It means something if people read your poetry. I think a picture unseen is unseen. You make a picture and put it up and somebody sees it, it’s better than them not seeing it. I always worked at home. I had no gallery. I worked in advertising during the day and then worked through the night making pictures and put them away in drawers. I was never really interested in showing, I was just interested in doing. I went into advertising and all my friends went into art, and I felt like I had left the group. But I kept working and working. Now, I’m more concerned with my work having a home, a museum or a school or a synagogue, some place that’s meaningful.
A significant body of your work deals with Jewish themes. How do those themes affect how you paint? When I’m doing a religious picture, I have a different context for how I’m working. With Jewish religious themes I’m thinking sound and movement. It’s very hard to convey. When you say “the Sabbath is the bride,” how do you convey in a drawing that feeling or the feeling of the presence of God without using clichés? Sometimes I’ll use sandpaper on a picture to take away some of the color and reveal the white below the surface I’ve covered up. There’s something there.
My father was not religious, though he was from a very religious family. His father took him out of school and made him work when he was twelve. He had to schlep wood. He said, “When I come to the United States, I’m never going to walk into a schul again.” And he never did. But I learned a lot of Judaism from him. It wasn’t about the law. “The law is easy,” my father would always say; “You can always change the law and move things. Decency is what’s important.” It’s funny, with my father we never went to schul, but he paid for his brother to become a rabbi.
My mother would tell me stories about her childhood in Poland. She also came from a very Jewish background. She went to a Jewish school, where the girls read the Bible in Yiddish. They made sure the women also knew what was happening in the Bible. You learn from stories. That’s the way it is with the Bible. A story you learn from. You read it. Someone says, “Well, why did he act that way?” Another says, “Why shouldn’t he have?” Then you get into the doing of an argument. And that’s what you learn from, the argument, not the point of view you took at the time. If you really listen to the story or you do the story, keep your mind open because the point of view you had in arguing may change next week. We are constantly changing. It’s what I bring to my work. There’s no one thing, no permanence of image. The work almost wants to be non-objective, non-configurative, non-visual to get the feeling.
When we study Torah, we keep reading it and re-reading it, and it’s new each time because we’ve changed. I think that’s one of the strengths of Judaism. There’s no one interpretation. I think that’s wonderful. You see the poem differently. It’s always alive, and if you try to lock it down it’s not Judaism. The Torah is there for you. It depends on you.
I once spoke to a group of Amherst alumni. I said, “Judaism is history, but it’s not a linear progression. What’s happening today around me and what happened 2,000 years ago is all mixed together; it’s in my psyche now.” A Jewish way of looking at history is completely different. As a Jew, I am doing history. The future, the present and the past meld into one along this road we are traveling. We do Judaism. I am as much in the past of my people as I am into today or the future.
- With Norman Gorbaty in his studio -