Peter Sacks

I recently read a profile of the artist Peter Sacks in The New Yorker, March 25, 2019 issue. The caption under his full-page photo reads, "Late in life and seemingly overnight, Peter Sacks became a visual artist with a fully formed and dauntingly complex aesthetic."

The article is titled "What Lies Beneath", written by Joshua Rothman, and I would highly recommend it.

Sacks is a fascinating subject. He seems to have excelled at whatever he has put his hand to. Born in South Africa in 1950 of Lithuanian Jewish descent, he became active in the anti-apartheid movement at an early age, befriending Steve Biko. Sacks was at various times an Olympic-level swimmer, a Rhodes scholar, an English professor whose text on the English elegy form is without rival, an acclaimed poet, and now "one of the most exciting painters in America".

Necessity 7, 2007-09, "incorporates Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Duino Elegies'
in English and German. Like many of Sacks' triptychs, it is more than 12 feet long."

Sacks made his first painting twenty years ago, and hasn't written a single line of poetry since. Known to work 14-hour days, he has laboured over almost a thousand paintings, mounting ten solo shows in increasingly prestigious galleries. His paintings are large and "sedimentary". They consist of as many as seven or eight layers, and are painstakingly built over a period of years. The layers sometimes include linen, onto which he has laboriously typed entire texts. They might also include twisted cloth, sometimes singed, and corrugated cardboard. Writes Rothman,

"Sacks needed to invent a ritualized form of art-making – creating, burying, burning, uncovering."

“Township 17,” from 2017-18.
The painting combines fabrics from India, Europe, West Africa, and the Arab world.

Said Christopher Bedford, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art,

"The paintings are deeply labor-intensive, almost painful in their execution. And the physical awareness that you're in the presence of something that was wrought over time, and that contains depth and layers that aren't visually perceivable, is very important. The feeling that the end point was reached through a process that you can sense but not perceive – that feels like history to me."

Farewell to an Idea 6, from 2010-12,
includes poems by Federico Garcia Lorca

Rothman creates a very compelling portrait of the artist, who currently works out of his studio on Martha's Vineyard. It makes me eager to find opportunities to see Sacks' work.

The article also prompted me to reflect on Rothman's classification of Peter Sacks' work. Not once was the term "collage", "textile art" or "fibre art" used in the New Yorker article. These are considered to be "paintings."