Jo Baer

Jo Baer by Billie Savage (2014)

Josephine Gail Baer (née Kleinberg; August 7, 1929 – January 21, 2025) was an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s.In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. After then, Baer fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lived and worked in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Quotes

• Narrative is telling a story, I’m providing a situation. And it's in time, right now. Paintings are not in time. These are not narrative paintings. They can't be. Painting is boom: it's one time! It doesn't move, unless you put two of them in diptychs, or cartoon strips. And that's how they move. You can be doing narrative that way, if you want. But single paintings are a situation, they're snapshots. So, I avoid the word narrative. I'm not telling a story. I'm telling a situation. And I don't know a better way to say that. If you have a better way, please give it to me now.
  • You once referred to your referential paintings as “image work.” Because you wanted to avoid, you said, the implications of narrative. What work do your images do?

• On the same canvas. Yes. Well, that's essentially what I'm doing. And I have been tempted to say that I make history paintings—but I know quite well that nobody anymore knows what I mean. If you say “classic,” that doesn't mean anything, but “history painting” is what I'm doing and I know I'm doing that, but I wouldn't choose it as a way of explaining it to an audience today cause they don't know.
  • Well, if you think about, for example, early Renaissance paintings, where you see the three kings and you see them visiting the Virgin and Child and you see the shepherds hearing the angels, and you also see them visiting Jesus, all of the narrative kind of happens at the same time.
• No, I wasn't interested in being Irish. And I wasn't interested in being in the Irish—in the sense of their mindset and miracles … I think you called them “myths.” But in the scheme of things, I liked the Irish and I liked living in Ireland and moreso familiarizing myself with their bewitching landscape and that story.
  • When you were living in Ireland, were you interested in—I knew you were interested in prehistoric Irish culture—what about some of the medieval things, like the Celtic things or the strange figures on churches?
• I have no idea! You've got more exotic Irish than I have. My neighbors would never tell me that sort of thing. They don't talk that way to me. I think it's rather interesting: a bunch of new paintings I'm thinking of doing still keep the “Giants” in mind. I came across something a couple of weeks ago where they found bones in Northern Ireland of a woman and a man. And I guess either in the same graves or next door to each other. But they were brother and sister. Incest. Maybe like the Pharaohs: they ruled as brother and sister.
  • Of course. I was thinking particularly of a type of Irish medieval decoration called the Sheela na gig, which is a female figure who opens her vagina. And they're on churches.