Writer-artist Mira Schor puts positive spin on the negative

In an essay called “Blurring Richter,” painter and writer Mira Schor brings her highly focused brand of imaginative intellect to bear on the German postwar painter Gerhard Richter.

The article on Richter is one of 15 in a “Decade of Negative Thinking,” a collection of her essays that straddle art criticism and memoir from the unique vantage point of a painter, feminist and child of WW II, which came out in February. Schor, who lives in both Provincetown and New York City, will be reading from her work at 8 p.m. Sunday, July 25, at ArtStrand Gallery, 494 Commercial St. in Provincetown. 

As her departure point in this collection, she presents the painting “Uncle Rudi,” from 1965, which formed part of the retrospective held for the painter at the Museum of Modern Art in 2001.

The painting — made, like much of early Richter, to suggest a blurred photograph — shows a Nazi official smiling at the camera. It is indeed Richter’s own uncle, who was an SS officer, before he was killed.

“If your family photo album includes Uncle Rudi,” asks Schor, “what are you going to do?”

The answer she elucidates is: you’d have to blur him. This leads her to a discussion of blurring as an aesthetic strategy generally. Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932, was haunted by his political environment and preoccupied with ideology and government-sanctioned death throughout his career.

“The intervention of the blur provides a necessary distance from the unendurable,” writes Schor.

Schor, whose parents, originally from Poland, fled Nazi-occupied France as Jews, tackles such subjects fearlessly in her book and her other writings, as well as language-infused visual art. Next to an image of “Uncle Rudi” she in fact provides a photograph of her own Uncle Moishe, who was killed in the gas chambers.

In the summer Schor lives in Provincetown in an antique house with steep stairs to the second floor. It was her family’s summer house; a dream of her parents only realized when Schor’s father, a painter and sculptor, died in 1961.

Schor shows some of the drawings that came in the wake of more recent personal losses that have been added to the loss of her father at age 11. Her sister Naomi Schor, a noted and influential scholar at Yale, died suddenly in 2001. Her mother, Resia Schor, an artist of silver jewelry and small objects and a long-cherished member of the Provincetown community, passed away in 2006 after a long and interesting life. Schor displays the modernist rings on her fingers made by her mother. They are chunky silver studies in abstraction.

Many of Schor’s recent notebook drawings, done with both matte and shiny black ink on translucent paper with creamy gesso backgrounds, contain the words “sister,” “mother,” “father.” Almost diagrammatically, they feature a stick figure with square glasses. And her book, while it takes on the culture at large, delves in and out of loss like a boat skimming obstacles on the water. 

The cover of the book reproduces the first of many informal notebook drawings: a large expressionist thought bubble in inky black that dominates and eclipses the page.

“I was sitting at my father’s workshop desk,” says Schor, “and asked myself, what is the most basic thing to do? I was just drawing on the page with ink. And I thought that I am at zero. I have arrived at a blank slate.”

During this period, it was difficult for Schor, whose productivity is ordinarily enviable, to get back to the studio.

“I questioned whether or not I could even be an artist with my mother dead. In many ways, being an artist was part of a shared dream.”

She has not gone back to oil painting so much in the years since these events, in fact, but focused instead on writing, archiving and drawing.

The present book follows an influential book published in 1997, with the sumptuous title “Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture.” In her next project, “The Extremes of the Middle,” she meticulously assembled the many writings, correspondences and journal entries of abstract expressionist painter Jack Tworkov.

The decade spans subjects as far-reaching as the dialectic of art and politics, feminist theory and artistic practice and reception. It also includes a fascinating piece about living in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, cataloguing the details of daily life in the aftermath of the horror — brave forays outside for provisions and news of what happened — from her apartment one block from Canal Street. After the planes crashed into the towers, Schor remained living in the zone nearest ground zero that was closed to traffic and engulfed by toxic clouds of debris.

By refusing any refuge in safe subject matter, Schor doesn’t only do relevant cultural criticism, but asks the necessary question: who else but artists are brave enough to do this work?