The medium is the message
Artist Ciel Bergman (1938-2017) spent seven years working on The Linens, a series of largescale paintings on view at the Center for Contemporary Arts. This body of work has been seldom seen or exhibited since she began it in the 1970s. Bergman, who died last year while the exhibit was still in the planning stages, started the project as a dialogue between herself and French artist Marcel Duchamp. Ranging from minimalist mark-making to a complex set of imagery and symbols, The Linens maps the artist’s engagement with Duchamp’s theories. She likened the project to a spiritual journey through the medium of paint. On the cover is a detail from Bergman’s 1974 painting Cactus America, acrylic on unstretched Belgian linen. (Pictured at right is the complete work.)
a 1957 lecture entitled “The Creative Act,” artist Marcel Duchamp said, “To all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.” In the 1970s, artist Ciel Bergman (1938-2017) began working on a series of large-scale paintings, whose creation epitomized Duchamp’s depiction of the role of the artist.
as the body of work currently showing at the Center for Contemporary Arts has become known, is enigmatic and personal. Bergman challenged herself to alter the artistic path she had been on prior to the series’ start, clearing away representationalism to discover new realms and ideas. She saw her process as a spiritual journey to a destination she could not predict.
Bergman was born in Berkeley, California, as Cheryl Maria Olsen. (Bergman legally changed her name in 1988 to honor the memory of her Swedish grandmother Emma Josephine Bergman.) She trained as a nurse in the areas of obstetrics and psychiatry, and married a man named Lynn Franklyn Bowers at the age of nineteen. She moved with him to Germany, where she was introduced to the works of European masters held in the continent’s prestigious art museums. Art would soon become her life’s calling.
Though Bergman trained privately as a portrait painter in the early 1960s after her return to the U.S., it wasn’t until 1970, at the age of thirty-two, that she sought a formal education at the San Francisco Art Institute. That same year, she began ,in which she decisively abandoned representational imagery for a more conceptual grounding. “The whole series was prompted by her influencing mentor, Marcel Duchamp,” said Angie Rizzo, the show’s curator. “She felt that she was actually having a dialogue with him. Duchamp was a huge critic of painting, and she was a painter. She was grappling with his concepts, his philosophies, and this lasted throughout her entire life.”
is an extensive body of paintings that have never before been exhibited en masse. Bergman, who lived in Santa Fe from 2006 until her death in January 2017, spent seven years working on
Together, the paintings, though they are complete compositions in themselves, could almost represent the parts of a single whole. They
continued on Page 26