THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 19
figuration and abstraction. Composi-
tion, bright color, narrative, and the
human figure have no place in her work,
which, at its best, conveys a timeless,
impersonal, and rather cold beauty that
can be inexplicably moving. When I
walked through the exhibition with her
in December, she was not happy about
the lighting in the first two galleries,
where her early paintings were hung.
(A technician went off to adjust it.) I
gathered that she had been driving the
museum’s installation staff slightly mad
with requests for minute changes in
lighting, picture height, wall labels, and
other details, and at the same time de-
lighting them with her mordant humor
and her lack of self-importance.
One gallery was dedicated to the
paintings that she considers her first ma-
ture works, all done in 1964—deadpan,
single-image still-lifes of functional ob-
jects in the studio she had at the time in
Los Angeles. There was a goosenecked
desk lamp with two bulbs, an electric
fan, an electric heater, a hot plate, an
old-fashioned revolver that someone had
given her to discourage burglars (she’s
never fired it), and other items, shown
in isolation against blank, painted back-
grounds. Some of these, the heater es-
pecially, with its glowing red coil, had a
somewhat ominous look. The most win-
ning image was an opened airmail en-
velope, with red and blue markings, on
a brown background. “I was painting so
fast then, a painting every two or three
days, trying to find a sensibility and a
touch that was anonymous,” she told me.
Like most artists of her generation,
she was also struggling to break away
from Abstract Expressionism, which
was still the primary influence in many
art schools. As she said to me, “De Koo-
ning and Pollock grabbed the whole
canvas and activated all of it.. .that was
something I had to do.” It’s hard to think
of an artist whose work is less like Pol-
lock’s or de Kooning’s. At U.C.L.A.,
where Celmins got her master’s degree
in art, in 1965, she started off painting
large, gestural abstractions in the Ab Ex
manner, but soon ditched all that, along
with most received ideas about art. “I
was a talented kid, but the work wasn’t
going in the direction I wanted,” she
said. “I thought it was too decorative.”
Painting the dumb objects in her stu-
dio, trying to make them be alive on the
wall, was a first step. It was followed, a
year later, by a series of predominantly
gray paintings based on news photo-
graphs of Second World War airplanes,
in flight or exploding or crashing into
the sea. The Vietnam War dominated
the news, and Celmins and other art-
ists marched in antiwar protests, but her
airplanes came from childhood mem-
ories of the earlier war.
Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Celmins
was almost two years old when the So-
viet Army invaded her country. For the
next four years, Latvia was a battleground
for Soviet and German forces. The Nazis
were driven back in 1944, and in the
chaos of the German retreat the Celmins
family (father, mother, older sister, and
Vija) fled from the Russians in a Ger-
man ship. The war was ending, but for
several months, as they moved from one
displaced-persons camp to another in
Leipzig, Mannheim, and Esslingen, they
were often in danger from American
and British air strikes. Celmins was ter-
rified of the airplanes and fascinated by
them at the same time. She has few other
recollections of those years in refugee
camps, which ended when the Church
World Service arranged the family’s pas-
sage to the United States, in 1948. “My
biggest nightmare was losing hold of
my mother’s hand, and never seeing her
again,” she told me. “It wasn’t until I was
ten years old and living in Indiana that
I realized being in fear wasn’t normal.”
Growing up in Indianapolis, Celmins
soon learned to fend for herself. “My
mother and father paid no attention to
me whatsoever,” she said. “They were
too busy with their own lives. This is
maybe what’s strong in me, that my par-
ents were like peasants—they had their
own way of dealing with things.” Her
father, Arturs, worked long hours as a
carpenter—in Latvia, he had been a
bricklayer and then a small-scale builder.
Milda, her mother, took care of other
people’s children and was a laundress in
a hospital. When Celmins was eleven,
her sister, Inta, eight years older and just
entering college, contracted tuberculo-
sis and spent the next three years in hos-
pitals. Their shared bedroom was now
Vija’s alone, and she spent a lot of time
in it, with the door closed. Drawing and
reading were her refuge and her solace
during her first year in America, when
she was struggling to learn English. Shecould read in Latvian, and by the end
of the year she was reading fluently in
English. (She is still an avid consumer
of both novels and nonfiction, as well
as books on art.) Eventually, she emerged
from her shell, made friends at school,
became a track star in running and the
high jump and as the class artist did the
illustrations for the yearbook. “I never
even thought about Latvia,” she said.T
he Venice section of Los Ange-
les was scruffy and run-down in
1963 when Celmins, in her first year at
U.C.L.A., moved into an empty store-
front a few blocks from the beach. There
was no real bathroom and no kitchen,
and for the next thirteen years Celmins
took showers at a friend’s apartment and
cooked on an electric hot plate—the one
in her painting. Artists were just start-
ing to discover Venice. Celmins met Ed
Moses, Ken Price, and Tony Berlant, who
lived in nearby Ocean Park and was a
year ahead of her at U.C.L.A. Berlant
was drawn to her “seductive personality,”
as he described it, and to her being “to-
tally self-critical and on another level
totally confident.” The L.A. art scene
was a men’s club—women artists were
scarce, and not especially welcome—but
“Vija was highly respected from Day
One, by everybody,” Berlant said. “It’s
not that she thought she was as good as
the men. She thought she was better
than anybody.” Celmins had close friend-
ships with male and female artists, but
she was unconcerned about trends and
expectations and fitting in. Both Celmins
and Berlant remember having long phil-
osophical discussions with the artist
Robert Irwin, who taught at U.C.L.A.
“Vija has perfect taste,” Irwin once told
Berlant. “She doesn’t like anything.”
Celmins had a rule against sleeping
with artists. “I was very haughty,” she
told me. “Sleeping was always going on,
but I thought that would take away my
power. I slept with my guys, who were
not artists.” The anti-artist rule didn’t
apply to her first love, a boy named Terry,
whom she met in her senior year of high
school. Both of them wanted to be art-
ists, and after graduation they spent five
years at the John Herron Art Institute,
in Indianapolis, a first-rate art school
that gave them a solid grounding in
traditional methods and materials. In
the summer of 1962, they travelled to