Curator Ingrid Schaffner Talks Hauser & Wirth’s Henry Taylor Show

James Jarvaise, the late California modernist (1924—2015), cuts a slick silhouette in Henry Taylor’s vibrant impasto rendering of him. Jarvaise, wearing black shades, his shoulder-length hair combed back, sits slouched at the lower center of Taylor’s glowing, yellow canvas. “He had swag,” Taylor has said of his subject and first real art teacher, who encouraged him to enroll in art school and eventually embark on a path to become the luminous, lauded talent Taylor is today.

Now, in keeping with Taylor’s long-held wish, that portrait he made of Jarvaise between 2015 and 2025, along with many more by both artists spanning seven decades, is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich until September 5, 2026. The exhibition, which traveled from Los Angeles, is titled “James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked,” in reference to advice Jarvaise once gave Taylor. It is also a poetically apt way into Taylor’s soulful brushstrokes.

“Jarvaise saw something in me even before I saw it myself,” Taylor has said of their relationship. In those early days in the 1980s, when Taylor began obsessively taking Jarvaise’s classes at Oxnard Community College, he was far from imagining he’d have a major solo show currently on view at the Musée Picasso in Paris. The same can be said of his acclaimed exhibition “Henry Taylor: B Side,” which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2023.

For his part, Jarvaise is not widely recognized today. Nevertheless, he showed his acclaimed “Hudson River Series” of abstract paintings in the historic 1959 exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, alongside the likes of Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. From the sounds of it, Jarvaise wasn’t too concerned with the trappings of fame, much less fortune, and was instead passionately dedicated to his art practice and teaching in and around Los Angeles. His former students include Charles Arnoldi, David Novros, Peter Plagens, and Robert Therrien.

Brought together as they are in this exhibition—with their paintings hung salon style and unlabeled on the wall, sprinkled with a few of Taylor’s sculptures—new connections are revealed between their forms. ARTnews sat down with the show’s curator, Ingrid Schaffner, to talk about how the exhibition reveals Taylor’s crucial use of landscape, deepening common, overly simplified readings of his practice as singularly focused on portraiture.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: How did this exhibition come together?

Ingrid Schaffner: This exhibition is a promise fulfilled. Any time Henry Taylor is interviewed, often when he gives a public talk, he always mentions James Jarvaise, and generally—well, always—people say, “Who?” James Jarvaise was his teacher, and he was the first to see Henry’s talent, and really his avocation to be an artist, even before Henry himself recognized that. So Taylor has carried this kind of sense of debt, of gratitude, to his teacher all these many decades. It was really his desire that this exhibition happen. He’s wanted to make their work present to one another in public for many years.

So this is all Henry’s idea?

When Henry joined the gallery, the gallery asked whether there was any dream project that he had. And Henry said, “I want to do an exhibition for James Jarvaise.” And that’s why it was a promise he made to himself, fulfilled.

Why was it important for Henry to have both their works shown side by side?

I think there are different ways to answer that, and one would be: Henry is celebrated, he has commercial success, he has critical success, and yes, Jarvaise exhibited in Southern California routinely, and he had a modest career, but his energy really was in teaching. So I think it’s maybe almost like a mantle of success that Henry wants to share.

James Jarvaise was a California modernist, born in 1924 in the Midwest, served in the US Army, went to art school on the GI Bill, and is really the first generation of professional art teachers in America. He taught largely at the University of Southern California, but also at CalArts, Occidental, and other major schools in LA. The exhibition spans the 1950s until now—really now—but I don’t think you feel it as a historic show. It’s about making these two artists’ works present to one another.

And bringing some added recognition to his mentor’s life practice.

Right. And being together. That’s what I feel when I see how Henry completed that painting [described in the introduction, titled James Jarvaise, “Sometimes the ‘straight’ line has to be crooked,” Santa Barbara] in dialogue with Jarvaise: being together.

[Beside Taylor’s painting of Jarvaise] is The Man in the Room, a painting by James Jarvaise from a series that he made in the 1960s. [It depicts a dark silhouetted figure turned away from the viewer, placed roughly where Taylor has painted Jarvaise on his canvas. Both paintings have a suspended, geometric strip to one side of a mostly monochrome background or room.]

For a second, I doubted whether this portrait [which I later learned depicted Jarvaise] was Henry’s work.

Yeah, there’s this nice back-and-forth, where you find yourself wondering … [Taylor] started this in 2014—2015 as a sketch, and it sat in the studio until we started working on this exhibition. Then he asked that he essentially be able to borrow this painting [by Jarvaise] and sort of paint to it, to bring this one to completion. Like if you have music in the studio.

On another salon-style wall, I had the studio in mind, so there’s a lot of sketches and a sense of improvisation and beginnings. Everybody’s mixed together, including a really early painting by Henry, from before 1988. But what’s nice about this is that you feel kernels of what Henry’s going to become: people, incidents, the flow of contemporary life.

This was before Taylor enrolled in art school?

At that point, Henry was working at Camarillo State Mental Hospital as an orderly technician at night. And during the day, he took classes at Oxnard Community College. He took a little journalism, writing, anthropology, set design. And then he takes a painting class with Jarvaise. And he takes it over and over. Anything that Jarvaise teaches, Henry signs up for. To the point where, years go by, and finally Jarvaise says: “Henry, you have to stop taking my class. You’ve got to go to art school.” Henry said, “I never thought that art school was for me.” And Jarvaise helps him put together a portfolio and apply to CalArts. Henry gets in, graduates with an MFA in 1995. He’s in the same class as Mark Bradford, who also attended as an older student, and then Henry becomes the Henry we know.

Did Taylor continue working with Jarvaise once he started his MFA? What was he like as a teacher?

Henry says that when he went to CalArts, he knew what he was getting into. CalArts is a very conceptual school, and he’s making figurative painting in his studio, and every time it’s crit time, the other students and professors just tell him to stop making figurative paintings. But he stayed the course, and he would put his paintings in his car and drive them to Oxnard Community College, and literally ambush Jarvaise as he was leaving work for a little lean-on-the-car crit. He said that what was so meaningful for him about these crits was that Jarvaise would look at the painting and tell him how to fix it, how to build it. Henry says it was like taking your car to the mechanic when it was making a pinging sound.

Jarvaise also told him to take his time, and if something’s not working, just wipe it out. Don’t be afraid to wipe out and start again.

Did Taylor contribute to the selection of works and display?

Not so much. It was really—let’s call it a desire. It’s really an emotional thing for Henry. His sort of sense of allegiance to Jarvaise. Having the work together does bring that element of emotion into the exhibition.

It also sounds like Jarvaise was very modest and could use people advocating for him more.

Yeah, Henry said he never even knew about that 1959 MoMA exhibition, because Jarvaise never talked about himself with students. Henry said he just randomly looked up Jarvaise on his phone one day and found a copy of the catalog. I don’t know if it was modesty. He was a very professional teacher, so it wasn’t about himself. Also, it’s not a story of someone overlooked by art history. [Jarvaise’s] work is in museums. It has its history. But Jarvaise was a professional teacher—that’s how he earned a living. Exhibiting was almost something you did because you want the work to be seen by your community.

In these works, we see Jarvaise paint figures, but also landscapes, which become almost distorted or nearly abstract.

Let’s just say, we feel landscape here. He and Diebenkorn are the exact same age and moment. It’s that moment—like the Bay Area figurative painters—you can feel something of the palette and the paint in there too. That’s some of the contemporary context for this work. And again for context, James Jarvaise was part of the history-making “Sixteen Americans” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, curated by the great Dorothy Miller.

Are some of the artworks shown in the 1959 exhibition included here?

One work [Hudson River School Series (Segora Hills), 1963] is related to this body of work called the “Hudson River School paintings” [in the 1959 show]. Jarvaise said: “I’m working abstractly, and I begin to feel just the colors and forms of California’s landscape coming into my work, and I feel this sort of affinity for what the Hudson River School painters must have felt when this American landscape infiltrates their painting.” That’s the genesis of this body of work, and these all relate to that Hudson River School series of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This horizon line that’s running around this room through both of their works, this palette too, this really high-keyed color that’s in Jarvaise—[and] Taylor. These forms, or these masses that are part figurative, part abstract—that’s also how Jarvaise built his paintings.

That’s the other thing I think is so interesting about this exhibition: It may be the first time we look at Henry and look past the people to landscape. But we also think about how he builds a painting, which he learned from Jarvaise.

[The exhibition] is the revelation of landscape in the work of Henry Taylor. [Schaffner points to several large paintings by Taylor of people framed by steep green hills in natural and urban landscapes.]

We think of Henry and we think of people and we think of portraiture and we don’t think of trees or landscape, but landscape is always there. And Henry says that’s something Jarvaise always encouraged him to locate: to ground your figure. It is this California landscape that’s rolling through both of their works.