.       

  RESONANT ECHOES - THE ART OF BASIL ALKAZZI
   By DENNIS WEPMAN

The artistic vision of Basil Alkazzi has never ceased to grow, 
reflecting the restless aesthetic spirit that it expresses and the 
ceaseless exploration of form, technique, and subject that it 
impels. Each phase of the artist’s work stands independently 
of itself, but each is necessarily the result of the long, unbroken 
journey of his life, and each expresses the spirit and mind of 
the artist, unchanged but ever-growing. Some artists speak to 
their own times, expressing the concerns, social, spiritual, or 
aesthetic, of their moment; others perpetuate the spirit of the 
past, projecting the eternal themes and employing the classic 
techniques of their predecessors. Both the contemporary and 
the traditional focuses have their values and their achievements, 
and both have a place in the panorama of art, but both have 
inherent creative limitations and dangers as well. The painter 
or sculptor who addresses too specifically his own era may be 
like the journalist who reports today’s news and whose work 
is forgotten tomorrow, and the same may be as true of manner 
as it is of matter: the history of art is littered with the detritus 
of trendy styles and subjects that command attention--and big 
prices--for a season and then disappear. On the other hand, the 
traditionalist who travels the well-worn path of the past surprises 
no one and can never aspire to higher status than that of a disciple, 
working “in the school of” his masters.

It is the rare artist who can successfully fuse style and substance 
past and present to create work that is both truly timeless and 
conceptually timely, who can speak with equal clarity to the 
present and the future. Such an artist is Basil Alkazzi, whose 
provocative work spans the centuries in both theme and style, 
treating the universal in thoroughly contemporary terms. The 
often enigmatic content of his art would be as appropriate--and 
as challenging--on the walls of a 17th-century manor house as 
on those of a 21st-century apartment.

The intellectual subtlety with which Basil Alkazzi harmonizes 
concept and presentation in his richly complex compositions is 
reflected in his pictorial technique, displaying diverse echoes of 
expressionism and impressionism, meticulously stylized formalism, 
elegant minimalism, and abstraction. His use of the figure for 
purposes of symbolic communication evokes the Symbolist painters 
and poets of France in the 1890s; the sometimes surprising 
juxtapositions call to mind the French and Italian Surrealists of 
the 1920s; the energy of his soaring astral and avian forms 
suggests the gestural art of the American 1950s. But throughout 
his long career, through the many stages of his developing vision 
and his endlessly restless exploration of form, Basil Alkazzi’s 
skilfully orchestrated compositions have consistently been 
organized with equal concern for both thematic content and 
visual design.

As impressive as the artist’s range of style and media is, still 
more remarkable is the unity of creative purpose he has 
maintained through the many vicissitudes of public taste and 
fashion. Through more than four decades of masterly work, 
he has never deviated from a rigorous adherence to his own 
aesthetic vision. Although flexible in technique and wide-
ranging in subject and theme, Basil Alkazzi has remained 
unmistakably and unswervingly himself, expressing his 
sensitive response to the world he sees and experiences in a 
variety of genres. If he has explored the different modalities 
with which artists have undertaken to embody their changing 
perceptions of reality, he has done so from an unmistakably 
personal angle of vision. His powerful 1961 crayon portrait 
of his mother--which might easily be taken for an early 
Picasso--and that of his father in ink from nine years later, is, 
like the four sensual nude studies of “Desmond” from 1974, 
evidences of a mastery of line that would do credit to the most 
classically oriented representationalist. But as early as 1960, 
in his 22nd year, he was creating semi-abstract figures. The 
gouache “Portrait” and his works of Christian symbolism of 
that year are stunningly original in conception. The hauntingly 
fragmentary “Madonna,” in Fauvist colors, and his torturous 
“Christ Crucified” strikingly foreshadow the mature artist 
to come.

   .				

The 1960s also saw a period in Basil Alkazzi’s art that drew    
on early antiquity. The historical progression in art from the   
“primitive” to the abstract was to come full circle, curiously   
linking the primeval images of our remotest antecedents with   
those of the most contemporary artists. The semantic content   
of ancient motifs is largely lost to us--we can only speculate   
about the spiritual concerns embodied in funerary ornaments   
or the celebratory and placatory functions of cave drawings and   
heroic monuments--but the pure forms of their archetypal design   
retain their power, undiminished through the ages. It is a rare   
sensibility that can awaken the primordial aesthetic and emotional   
response to these ancient forms within the visual framework of   
our own age. In a striking series of “Cretan” paintings (1963)--a   
“Circus” and a “Landscape” in ink--the artist captures something   
of the underlying dynamic of its archaic sources. In a stylized   
composition of “Worshipers, Square, & Moon” from the same   
year, the artist focuses more on the design, emphasizing in the   
arrangement of his stick-figure celebrants the formal composition   
of his work and reinforcing his point by his title.

If an exploration of ancient motifs and stylized forms from 
remote antiquity characterized some of Basil Alkazzi’s work 
in the 1960s, however, those paintings were seldom without a 
contemporary element. “Figures in Landscape” and “Lovers,” 
two boldly faux-naïf ink drawings from 1963, are playfully 
modern in their suggestive images. More darkly surrealistic 
are the disquieting “Life & Birth of Dead Foetus” and 
“Nocturnal Landscape,” both from 1966. As the decade 
progressed, the artist’s vision darkened further as he devoted 
himself to a series of nocturnal landscapes featuring increasingly 
dramatic images of birth and death. “Pregnant Woman & Bird” 
of 1966 has a visceral quality that evokes the terror of primal 
nature, the 1967 “Birth & Life” and the series “Lovers & Dreams,” 
with their vivid contrasts of light and darkness, their flashes 
of lightening, and their stark imagery, are both haunting and 
disturbing. The oneiric 1968 “Mother and Child” and 
“Bird Fleeing Death” are even more so.

Basil Alkazzi’s early visions were not always disturbed or  
disturbing. His series of “Seascape with Fish” from 1973-74,  
their neatly patterned figures gliding along an equally neat and  
symmetrical shore, have an engagingly child-like innocence  
that reflects a serene spirit, and even the work specifically  
identified as inspired by dreams is peaceful. His 1970 collage  
series “Landscape of Dreams,” in fact, seems not only serene  
but even, in places, joyous, though the artist himself has added  
a melancholy note in reference to these three pieces. “The  
tragedy with dreams,” he wrote in 1970, “is that they are so  
solitary, the other person is seldom consulted, so that, when it  
comes to assembling it, like a jig-saw puzzle, the other person,  
the other piece does not fit in, does not want to, or can’t.  
Perhaps they belong to a different picture--someone else’s  
dream.”		

The human figure remains absent, or nearly so, in much of the  
work of the late 1970s, but the human spirit is clearly evident.  
The “Night of Glorification” referred to in two paintings of  
1976, and “Come, the Night of Glory Has Come” of the next  
year, do not specify what is glorified, or by what, but the  
beneficiary of the glory is clearly human. And the 1976 “Birth  
of Creation” is exultant. Love, in fact or in prospect, begins to  
dominate the artist’s work from this period. It is sometimes  
explicit, clearly corporeal, as in the two “Transmutation of  
Lovers” and the disturbingly titled “The Lover and the Killer  
Are One” from 1980, all fusing the bodies of their subjects.  
Basil Alkazzi’s seascapes have by then abandoned their fish  
and are clearly anthropocentric. “Seascape with Figures I  
and II” of 1981 focus, in fact, on the figures almost  
exclusively; the viewer must take the artist’s word for the  
sea behind or beneath them. The figures in these paintings,  
like those in the “Lover” pieces, are stylized, to be sure, but  
unequivocally human, solid and richly modelled in warm  
flesh tones, radiant against the dark backgrounds.				

The love celebrated in Basil Alkazzi’s paintings of the early  
80s is not always erotic, however; increasingly it is rather  
spiritual than sensual. As George S. Whittet has noted,  
“During the 1970s a covert element of mysticism invested  
the paintings. . . . By the early 1980s after an interlude  
engaged with the theme of lovers at much closer range as  
symbolic, earthbound and sculptural masses, [Alkazzi]  
resumed his search for material resolution of inner subliminal  
compulsion.”1 In the 1982 oil painting “Transmuted Lovers  
& Flight…I,” the lovers are still apparent, seen distantly  
and dimly through the arch of a cold and forbidding edifice,  
but they have been transmuted far more than those in the  
1980 “Transmutation of Lovers,” overwhelmed by the  
mysterious structure surrounding them and the dark night  
sky above. They have disappeared entirely from “Awaiting  
Birth of Soul,” “A Soul, Awaiting the Moment,” and “O  
Contented Soul, Return to Thine Abode, Blessed and in  
Peace,” the highly spiritualized paintings of the same year.  
The figures, barely perceptible in these paintings, are not  
bodily lovers; they have been transmuted to pure spirit and  
move serenely on their ethereal way.

Although the artist’s work became increasingly spiritualized 
and abstract in the 1980s, he never lost his grounding in 
reality and physical form. His early experiments with collage, 
surely the most substantial medium presented on a flat 
surface, did not end with the 1970 “Landscape of Dreams” 
pieces. The same year he explored the possibilities of 
portraiture in fragmenting photographs of Liza Minnelli, 
entitling it “Liza Minnelli and Liza Minnelli” to show the 
two “faces” of an actress and a private person and how they 
interact and express themselves within a picture frame, a 
living moment of time. In 1985 when, temporarily 
handicapped by a strained tendon in his arm and unable to 
paint, the artist sought another channel for his creativity 
and began to play with the idea of photo-montage. Images 
formed by composing elements from separate photographic 
sources, photo-montage had been around since the Dadaists, 
and the term had been in use since 1918, but the medium 
had not been widely known until a show by David Hockney 
introduced his “photo-collages,” as he called them, at the 
Emmerich Gallery in New York City in 1983. The exhibition 
opened to mixed reviews; Stuart Morgan wrote of it in 
Artscribe, “An applied style kills the subject and makes the 
whole business little more than a technical exercise,” but the 
British Journal of Photography described the show as “the 
single most important photographic exhibition for over ten 
years.” Like David Hockney, Basil Alkazzi composed his 
photo-montages of elements from many photographs of the 
same subject. His “Patti Palladin, 3 Ibis & No Craw Fish” 
comprised elements of 103 or so photographs, and “Ronald 
Kuchta & Glasses” comprised 60 or so. In both the artist 
achieved a dynamic sense of movement by deliberately 
moving the camera as he photographed.

A personal diversion with no thought of exhibition or, like  
David Hockney’s work, the production of editions for sale,  
Basil Alkazzi’s photographs were all of people he knew, some  
of them old friends, some recent ones, but all sharing personal  
relationships with the artist. The subjects are all posed and  
stationary, but many achieve that quality of “snap shot”  
movement. Part of the kinetic effect derives from the artful  
use of formal elements within the images themselves. “Tim  
Powell and Stripes” and “Ronald Kuchta at 11:15” (1987)  
both depend on the broken arrangement of the striped patterns  
on their subjects’ shirts. (The hour in the latter title refers to  
the position of the hands on Kuchta’s watch in the picture.)  
“Ronald Kuchta & Glasses” makes a seeming patchwork of  
its model’s jacket, and it is also the fragmentation of her  
luxurious clothing that provides motion to the glamorous  
portraits of Eva J. Pape. The humorously named and  
composed “Vivienne Thaul Wechter & Bruised Toe” (1988)  
appends its solemn subject’s swollen toe in an isolated  
segment as a sort of jocular footnote. A small collection  
of these pieces was exhibited at Fordham University and was  
issued in book form in 1988, but the artist makes no very  
serious claims for his work in this rarefied medium. He  
pursues photography, as he has stated, whenever there is a  
lull in his painting, “as an alternate form of creativity.” Its  
status doesn’t worry him. “Is it good art? Bad art? Or is it  
art at all?” he asks rhetorically. “Frankly, I don’t care.  
I enjoy it, and that is all that matters.”2

While transferring his need to create into this form because 
of the injury to his elbow, Basil Alkazzi never stayed long 
away from the serious business of his life. In the middle 1980s, 
his art became less concrete, more deeply visionary, his 
symbolism sometimes obscure but always gripping. Such 
mysterious (and mysteriously entitled) paintings as “And Still 
They Whisper, Still You Whisper, Still They Wait” (1986) 
show stylized figures huddled in two groups at the arch of one 
of his hieratic buildings, immersed in unfathomable conversations. 
The composition is hypnotizing in its elegant balance, the content 
intriguing in its mystery. Equally tantalizing is the series of 
three paintings from the next year, “Transmutations in Time,” 
their spectral human figures moving beneath heavenly bodies 
unknown to our astronomy in a dark night rendered in deeply 
saturated cobalt and purple. Other 1987 paintings reveal the 
recurring motif of the triangle, an ancient arcane symbol Basil 
Alkazzi utilizes in his elegant personal logo and uses here with 
profound effect. The series “Wait, Look, See How It Comes, 
Across the Isthmus” and “And Now It Comes, See How It Comes, 
the Seal of Love,” employ the geometric shape in multiples, 
superimposing the triangles to form the traditional Hebrew symbol 
known as the Seal of Solomon, beneath refulgent skies teeming with 
huge rushing planets, and vast slashes of brilliant light cleaving 
the opaque night. These motifs continue into the 1990s, but the 
range of color grows; “Transmutations III, IV, V, and VI,” a 1991 
series of gouache paintings, present the familiar circle and triangle, 
huge and incandescent, in subtle tones of purple. Deeper shades appear, 
rich gold and blues that verge on black, in the heroic 1992 series of 
thirteen gouaches “The Last Supper,” now in the Santa Barbara 
Museum of Art.

“At this time there was a change of direction away from the 
non-objective, though still symbolic painting to the extraordinary 
group of figures on the theme of The Last Supper,” the critic 
Max Wykes-Joyce has written of this series. “In selecting the 
theme, Basil Alkazzi has aligned himself in a tradition which 
runs in Western painting from the Fourteenth Century to the 
present day, from Fra Angelico to Stanley Spencer. Skilfully 
he has avoided wearisome comparisons with past paintings and 
with historical imagery by the portrayal of the hands of the 
participants, Jesus of Nazareth and his followers, and the ritual 
wine cup which went its rounds at the supper table.

Viewed dispassionately, they might be well described as a very 
odd group, including among them four fisherman- two pacific 
and two of such vehement conviction they were named the Sons 
of Thunder; a carpenter; a tax inspector; a nobleman; and a 
disaffected and disappointed militant. Each is represented and 
revealed in Basil Alkazzi’s The Last Supper by no more then a 
pair of hands in conjunction with a wine goblet, itself moving into 
medieval history and ritual history, as the Holy Grail. The 
predominant colours of the Supper sequence are the golden flesh 
tints of the hands and the gold of the wine cup against a 
night-sky-blue background and jet-black foreground.”3

Dream, memory, spirit, love, time, all return again and again as 
motifs in Basil Alkazzi’s œuvre, endlessly varied in composition, 
association, form, and color. No less pervasive is the theme of 
progression, the elevation of the spirit, represented now as an 
idealized ascending form, now as a heavenly body. In the inspired 
and inspiring 1996 gouache “Blossoming Moon in Skyscape II,” 
in the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art at the State 
University of New York at Purchase, the soul is presented as a 
swelling moon tracing its path across the night sky as it advances 
from dark to full maturity. Scale, essential to the magnitude of the 
theme, is an essential element in the impact of this eight-part 
painting, which measures almost three by more than fourteen feet. 
“A Fragrance of Dreams III,” executed the next year and now a 
part of the permanent collection of the Dayton Art Institute in 
Ohio, is more clearly defined in its symbolism but equally positive 
in its message. It depicts a solitary soul drifting upward, illuminated 
by an arc of luminous moons, radiantly traversing the cerulean 
heavens.

In 1999-2000 after a move to the South of France, the artist varied 
his serene mysticism, turning from sombre blues to throbbing yellows 
and vibrant greens in richly sensuous compositions. Abstraction is
ordinarily the most austere mode in the plastic and graphic arts;
 intending no precise representation, whether derived from nature 
or from pure formal invention, it need evoke no associative response, 
dealing with the universal rather than the particular: form 
unencumbered by substance. But not all abstract art excludes the 
physical world from its content. Picabia, Arp, and Miró all painted 
“non-objective” but biomorphic images more or less clearly 
evocative of nature. In Basil Alkazzi’s gouaches in the “Rites of 
Spring” series, the swirling protoplasmic shapes and the burning 
yellows of his abstracted flowers display a compelling emotional 
energy. Abstraction may aim at appealing to a chaste intellectual 
spirit by stripping its subjects to the bare bones of form and color, 
but no one can look at the incandescent figures in Basil Alkazzi’s 
work of the turn of the century without realizing the resources of 
sultry sensuality it can summon. The resplendent flowers of 
“The Rites of Spring,” the rich-hued skies alive with planets, suns, 
and moons hurtling through infinite space, the swirling forms 
balancing the cool shapes of classical geometry, provide a great 
range of aesthetic impact.

Basil Alkazzi’s imagery expresses a mysterious and complex personal 
vision with a magnetic force that draws us at times inward and at 
other times into infinite space; it spans the microcosmic and the 
macrocosmic, the poised and the kinetic, protozoa and planets, the 
autochthonous and the celestial. In his "Rites of Spring" he is as richly 
allusive and at the same time as innovative as Stravinsky, from 
whose ballet he may have taken the title of the series. Like the 
composer, he is an artist, who creates from within a framework of 
profoundly interior association, his luminescent canvases always a 
projection of a personal vision of reality expressed in a uniquely 
private iconography.

The critic Donald Kuspit has observed, “Basil Alkazzi has found the 
vital archetype of cosmic nature within that of mundane nature. 
He shows that what seems to be hollow form has an archetypal 
content. The rich colour and dynamic line go a long way towards 
convincing us that his life-force flowers and heavenly objects have 
archetypal import—towards re-originating them as spiritual entities, 
indicating that natural life is simultaneously spiritual life, and as 
such a sign of the spiritual purpose and sacred character of the cosmos. 
His life-force flowers blot out the horizon or boundary between heaven 
and earth, and he shows us heavenly objects about to burst through it, 
suggesting that the separation of natural space and cosmic space—
implicitly matter and spirit—is far from absolute. It is only in this 
regard that he disagrees with Emerson, who declared that ‘the health 
of the eye seems to demand a horizon.’4 Basil Alkazzi shows us that 
the eye is really healthy when it can see beyond the horizon, without 
any frame for its consciousness.”5

The archetypes that Basil Alkazzi has evoked throughout his working 
life follow the inner logic of the artist, reflecting a mythology of his 
own. Enigmatic, provocative, sometimes disturbing, his private language 
may challenge reason and compel the viewer to accept the work that 
employs it on its own intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic terms. It never 
stoops to the literal, though it sometimes uses the literal to evoke and 
represent the supernal. As Donald Kuspit has noted elsewhere “Basil 
Alkazzi’s art . . . is a sacred, spiritual art, for it unites images of sacred 
geometry and sacred life. Abstraction is the best way of invoking the 
sense of the sacred, if only because it eliminates the appearance of the 
everyday world. . . . Transcendental ecstasy is Basil Alkazzi’s ultimate 
subject matter.”6

The relevance of his work, and indeed of all art, raises a fundamental 
question for Donald Kuspit, who asks, “What has art done for humanity?” 
and answers himself eloquently: “In asking this question, I am aware of 
what science and technology have done for humanity. A special issue
 of Newsweek documents ‘The Power of Invention,’ more particularly, 
‘How an explosion of discoveries changed our lives in the 20th century.’ 
How has 20th century art changed our lives for the better? That is the 
question that has subliminally informed my discussion of Basil Alkazzi’s 
art, which offers one answer—an answer that places it in what for me 
is the grandest tradition of twentieth century art. His art, like that of 
Kandinsky and Rothko, keeps alive a sense of spirituality in a century 
that, however materially glorious, has been spiritually bankrupt, with 
devastating emotional consequences for its inhabitants. Like their art, 
Basil Alkazzi’s art is concerned with what Kandinsky in Concerning 
the Spiritual in Art called ‘the all important spark of inner life’—in the 
modern world ‘only a spark.’ It is implicit in the ‘inner meanings’ or 
‘spiritual vibrations’ of colours, which seem to have a life of their own. 
Like Kandinsky’s and Rothko’s subtle art of color, that of Basil Alkazzi ‘
endeavors to awake the subtler emotions, as yet unnamed,’ than those 
that occur in the course of everyday life—emotions that sparkle with, 
and seem a source of, inner life.”7 

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a shift in Basil Alkazzi’s 
focus as the esoteric imagination of the previous few years has made 
way for a return to the solid forms of nature, but with no less of the 
“transcendental ecstasy” noted in his more abstract Rites of Spring. 
The enigmatic imagery of that series painted in 1999 and 2000 was 
transformed into more clearly organic forms, equally intense in spirit 
and at times equally personal in their symbolism. Among the most 
powerful of these works are series exploring times of day 
(Dusk, Twilight, and Sunset in 2002 and 2003, all as rich with 
personal iconography as his earlier work), the seasons (Blossoming 
Spring in 2003, at once passionate and lyrical), and several classical 
landscapes in that same year. For the moment, the compositional 
elements that recur through much of the artist’s earlier work are 
absent, and he dwells on the natural world with a kind of tremulous 
nostalgia.

“I used to look inward and heavenward for inspiration and expression,”
 the artist has written, “but since moving to Monaco in the South 
of France my whisperers have altered my creative vision, directing 
it to the heaven on earth. . . . " More concrete, more focused on 
reality, and perhaps on that account more rapturous, his work in 
the last few years has descended to the earth thematically but 
ascended to the stratosphere emotionally. The influence of his 
Mediterranean surroundings is perceptible in the warmth and vibrancy 
of his presentation, in the poise and serenity of his personal tone, and, 
in recent years, in his choice of subject: lilies explored in all the 
amazing shapes and colours of that aristocratic genus through 2004 
and 2005; the sumptuous iris in 2006 and 2007. These natural jewels 
have provided material to artists for centuries, but each brings to his 
perception of them his own sensibility. The rich colours of Basil 
Alkazzi’s florals are chromatically accurate, but they have a clarity 
and vibrancy that give them a dimension not found in mere horticultural 
illustration. The forms are organic, solid, and controlled, but it is the 
interplay of hues that creates the vital colour landscape outside of and 
above the literal reality they depict. In sharing Basil Alkazzi’s response 
to his subject, we never lose sight of the fact that we are seeing 
something more than the natural form; we are seeing the artist’s spirit, 
expressed in his own unique aesthetic language.

If the interpretation of these paintings is sometimes demanding, it is 
also exhilarating. The imagery seems private, but it is never without 
a universal relevance that transcends the particular, and in this it 
compels the viewer to provide that final element of personal involvement 
necessary to the complete experience of art. It is one of the most 
exciting aspects of Basil Alkazzi’s painting that he credits us with the 
perception and the spiritual maturity to do so. His message is not always 
clearly articulated; we are compelled to participate in the creative act. 
But the work is not hermetic. If he works from a personal vision, his art 
is not only accessible but richly rewarding to those emotionally and 
aesthetically open to the experience it offers. Basil Alkazzi is singularly 
in touch with his own spirit and his own world view; if he does not 
demand that the viewer share that view--and there is nothing strident in 
the tone of these masterfully self-contained works--he impels an emotional 
and an intellectual response by the passionate artistic integrity of his work, 
and by the depth of feeling that informs it.

NOTES:
          
1 George S. Whittet, Mystic Dreamscapes: The Art of Basil Alkazzi 
      (Brooklyn, Conn.: NECCA1988).

2 Basil Alkazzi, Portrait: Strangers No Longer Strangers, Now Acquaintances, 
      Friends, Lovers... (Brooklyn, Conn.: NECCA1989)

3 Max Wykes-Joyce, Basil Alkazzi-New Seasons... (Jersey, CI: Izumi Art 
      Publications Ltd. 1993)

4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Adresses, and Lectures (Cambridge,
      Mass.: Harvard University Press 1979) p.13

5 Donald Kuspit, Basil Alkazzi-The Rites of Spring (Jersey, CI: Izumi Art 
      Publications Ltd. 2000)

6 Donald Kuspit, Basil Alkazzi-New Horizons (Jersey, CI: Izumi Art 
      Publications Ltd. 1998)

7 Ibid