Untitled, Charles Arnoldi

Charles Arnoldi
United States born 1946
Untitled
Painted wood, ca. 1979
Gift of Mason and Elizabeth Phelps
1994:113
© San Diego Museum of Art

Like several other artists working in the Southern California art scene in the 1960s and 1970s—including Billy Al Bengston, John McCracken, and Laddie John Dill—Charles Arnoldi experimented across the disciplines of painting and sculpture, occupying an ambiguous position between the two. A single event in Arnoldi’s life became the impetus for his sculptures built of branch shapes and his paintings featuring a forest of strongly hued diagonal lines. While standing in an abandoned orchard in Malibu that had been severely damaged by fire, he noticed that the bare branches had been turned into charred linear silhouettes against the landscape. The blackened branches became for the artist “prefabricated lines” and “hand-drawn” gestures in space. At first Arnoldi placed actual branches into a grid-like pattern on the wall, which offered him an alternative to brushstrokes. In his next phase he began to shape the branches into sticks that were then painted in a gestural style. In Untitled the unique original markings—a knot or slit in the bark—retain the individuality of each branch. The horizontal format of the work and the irregular negative shapes formed by the boxy linear patterns of the sticks retain the formal qualities of the grid imposed by the frame of a painting and at the same time make reference to landscape. The unnatural and aggressively colored surface treatment further relates these sculptural forms to the realm of the painting.

Untitled recalls the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s transition to abstraction in the early twentieth century. Mondrian too took a tree with its winter branches fully exposed as a point of departure. His works based on the denuded limbs recall the process of becoming abstract, and yet they stop short of dispensing with naturalism. The Museum’s example of Arnoldi’s work may be seen as a moment at which he intersects Mondrian’s march toward pure abstraction.

Discussion Questions

(For Grades K-2)

What type of material is this work of art made of? (wood, paint)

Can works of art be made without paper or canvas? What sort of materials could you used to make a work of art if you did not have paper or canvas?

Is this work a sculpture or a painting? What tells you that? Can it be both?