Artistic VES Prof Immortalized in Film

Abstract landscape painter Albert Alcalay once said that as an artist, “you are an explorer of yourself.”

For Alcalay, a professor emeritus in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), art is an expression of the self or the results of inward exploration. It is therefore fitting that the new biographical documentary of Alcalay by three VES alumni be entitled Albert Alcalay: Self-Portraits. Alcalay himself, who would call all of art a self-portrait, could not have summed it up better.

“What is art?” Alcalay muses in the film, which premiered at the Harvard Film Archive on January 22. “Art is an organizational form, a form that expresses human feelings. That means that only humans can produce art.”

In the early 1970s, two film students in the VES department, Rob W. Tranchin ’74 and Allen D. Moore ’74, were wondering the same thing.

“We were snapping photographs of each other and looking at each other and wondering, ‘Is this really art?’” Moore said.

They resolved the question later, as both went on to become documentary filmmakers, with Tranchin working for PBS in Texas and Moore in Maryland. In 1999, they received a project proposal from another former classmate, Rob D. Eustis ’78. They were to direct a film about the painter with the enormous palette from the third floor of the Carpenter Center, whom Tranchin had admired but who was only vaguely familiar to Moore.

What they had known of Albert Alcalay in the ’70s was that he worked prolifically and that his presence at Harvard preceded the Carpenter Center and the VES department itself. Before he arrived at Harvard, Alcalay, as a Serbian Jew, was an immigrant in New York City. Before his arrival in the States, Alcalay was interned in a concentration camp in Italy where he learned, of all things, to become an artist.

Self-Portraits begins with a shot of Alcalay performing his most arduous daily task: the morning climb to his third-story studio. Alcalay mounts the stairs with a cane, one hand gripping the rail. The artist himself is narrating, as he does for most of the film, describing painting, in this moment of hardship, as the “pinch in my ass.”

“I have to hold a brush,” he says. “It’s part of my daily routine.” Tranchin and Moore understood this view of art and its connection to Alcalay’s past, which emerges in their interviews with the painter. “All the various moments of his life suddenly become milestones,” Moore said. “That’s how the structure of the film evolved.”

Alcalay was taught by the German artist Michel Fingesten, who also imprisoned in the camp and taught his student the crucial lesson of the artist—not how to make art, but how to live it.

After this encounter, Alcalay says in the film, “I realized that art was spirituality, not technique.” From then on Alcalay’s artistic awareness was entwined with the consciousness of being alive. When he was finally released from the concentration camp, the sun struck him “like a ton” and he fainted.

New York in 1951 was “a new reality” for Alcalay, or a full-bodied assault on his artistic sensibilities. Amidst the skyscrapers and the “madhouse” of Times Square, always with “jazz pounding in his head,” he was stunned and momentarily unable to shake free.

“For the first two weeks,” he says, “I had a crooked neck. I was just looking up.” He would stand every day on the street corner until the madness around him slowly registered, first in his mind, then in vibrant abstraction on canvas.

As a painter, Alcalay was initially influenced by the Expressionist movement, then moved deeper into his love of landscape. He realized later that the three worlds among which he moved—Expressionism, landscapes and abstract painting—and which became in their disparateness a source of frustration, were not mutually exclusive. In the end, the landscape still needed to be expressed by his brush.

Alcalay’s own vision gave the water in his 1949 work “By the Shores of Ostia,” its particular murkiness and the houses their faded oranges and purples, evocative of sunset. He infused his later 1984 work “Study for Festivities” with a sense of pure human joy, though the painting does not contain a single human figure. When Alcalay finally came to grips with himself as a landscape painter, he saw himself in his early years as “describing the landscape. Now, I’m evoking the landscape.”

Alcalay is now 86 years old. He has a wide face and frame and white hair that encircles his large head in a cloud-like wisp. Some years ago he had a double bypass, and the steady toll of macular degeneration over the years have made him legally blind. He reads with the aid of a scanning device that magnifies words from a page on a television monitor, each word filling up almost the entire screen.

He retired from teaching in 1997 and since 1986, the VES department has awarded the Albert Alcalay Award to the best student in a workshop studio.

Blindness has also become a milestone. The light that reaches Alcalay’s eyes has diminished by as much as 50 percent. For years, he has had trouble distinguishing between blue and green. “I was teaching the other colors,” he says.

Now Alcalay paints with even greater abstraction—what he calls “shaping the white” or using color as markers for the blurred light he is able to perceive.

Decades after his initiation into the world of self-exploration, Alcalay still has much to discover and express. Alcalay says that Tranchin and Moore should not be short of material to document in their biography, and the film “should be another couple of hours.”

—Staff writer Lily X. Huang can be reached at lxhuang@fas.harvard.edu.