28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Henry Taylor's Mentor Was the Art World's Bruce Lee
Spend time with the Los Angeles painter Henry Taylor and you'll hear a name repeated with such single-minded conviction, it can feel as if he's trying to rouse a spirit. Jarvaise. The painting teacher who took an interest in his work in the 1980s, when Taylor was a hapless student trying to figure out what to do with his life. Jarvaise. Who prodded Taylor to quit hanging around community college and enroll at the California Institute of the Arts. Jarvaise. The paternal figure Taylor might call at 2 in the morning when he was feeling sentimental.
Taylor is now renowned for the imaginative ways he has captured Black life on canvas. In 2022, he was the subject of a critically acclaimed survey that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet even at these altitudes, he has never stopped the mononymic conjuring of Jarvaise.
'There are a lot of people that teach karate, but they're not Bruce Lee,' Taylor says. 'Jarvaise was Bruce Lee.'
Jarvaise is James Jarvaise, the Southern California painter (he died in 2015) who taught not just Taylor, but generations of area artists — including the painter and critic Peter Plagens, the painter Charles Arnoldi and the sculptor Robert Therrien. In 1959, Jarvaise was also one of three Californians to be featured in 'Sixteen Americans,' an influential survey organized by Dorothy Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he presented a series of abstracted landscapes that distilled mountains and sky into elegant experiments in color and line. But unlike artists in the show who went on to prominence, including Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly, Jarvaise didn't achieve similar renown, choosing to remain in California at a time when the art world orbited around New York.
Taylor's continuous invocation of Jarvaise has now summoned his mentor into view. On Sunday, Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles will open 'James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor: Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked,' which gathers almost seven dozen works produced over several decades by both painters. (The show runs through Oct. 5.)
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