As Vision Fades, Painting Goes On
Pablo Picasso probably wasn’t thinking about macular degeneration when he said: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up.”
But the statement holds true for Serge Hollerbach, 94, a Russian-born artist in Manhattan who painted throughout his vision loss caused by macular degeneration.
The disease is projected by 2020 to affect around 200 million people worldwide — typically depleting their central vision and leaving most legally blind, but with some remnant of sight.
As Mr. Hollerbach’s vision began deteriorating in 1994, his work shifted from realism with a dose of expressionism to something more abstract. Defined shapes made way for something looser. Colors shifted from muted to bright. His rigid perfectionism dropped off as his sight blurred, “like water in the eyes after taking a swim,” he said.
“There is such a thing as a second childhood,” Mr. Hollerbach said, explaining how his paintings changed. “To be playful, you have nothing to lose. Nothing to lose is a kind of new freedom.”
The pre- and post-macular degeneration works of eight artists, including Mr. Hollerbach, Lennart Anderson and Hedda Sterne, are the focus of “The Persistence of Vision” at the University of Cincinnati, which runs through July 29.
“The late works are gorgeous,” said Brian Schumacher, a curator of the show. “They stand on their own as viable and legitimate and beautiful works of visual art.”
One afternoon in his studio, Mr. Hollerbach held a plastic cup up close to his face. “That’s blue isn’t it?” he asked himself. He would go on to create a beach scene. It was a back and forth process as he placed the canvas on a flat table to apply the acrylic paint so it wouldn’t run. “I can’t really see what I am doing,” he admitted, adding, “I will look at it later.”
Among the show’s other artists is David Levine, whose “The Last Battle” is an incomplete work that followed his vision loss. Instead of detailed faces like those in his earlier depictions, he stuck to silhouettes and skipped details.
The exhibition is an extension of the larger Vision and Art Project, funded by the American Macular Degeneration Foundation.
“It is good for other artists to know that there are these resources available so you don’t feel isolated,” said A’Dora Phillips, the director of the project.
Thomas Sgouros’s vision deteriorated quickly over six months in 1992, and at times he contemplated ending his life, according to the exhibition’s catalog. Eventually, he adapted his painting for the remaining 20 years of his life. To create the series “Remembered Landscapes,” he felt his way around the canvas using masking tape and a T-square and found his colors by keeping them in the same formation on his palette.
When William Thon became legally blind in 1991, he had painted so many boats, birds and trees he could continue to do so “by touch and by instinct,” said Carl Little, an art critic who watched him paint in 1997. Instead of brushes, he used his fingers to feel as he created, and simplified his palette to black and white.
When macular degeneration struck Lennart Anderson in the early 2000s, the lines of his work loosened up, and details were scaled back. His gradual adaptation to vision loss is seen across his large- scale acrylic painting “Idylls 3,” which is in the exhibition. He started the piece in 1979 and finished it in 2011, long after the colors on his palette were no longer distinguishable to his faded eyesight.
Reviewing the “Idylls” series, the late art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in 2001, “In a saner art world than ours, museums would be vying for the honor of mounting a major retrospective of Mr. Anderson’s work.”