OIL PAINTINGS

Jim Blake - Harvard GSD '79

Author:
Station Point: Cezanne, Picasso, Braque: the birth of a Language, The Bliss Engine Distill the Zeit, and Fracture 1000

July 2, 2025

Holland's recent (past ten years) paintings are a voluptuous carousel-collage, a Freudian field guide to the late 1950s and 60s American obsession with googie architecture, tailfins, bosomy babes rendered in a cosmically seductive palette of quantum hue.

Note:
It is rare in the world of capital A fine art that a painter is also an avant garde artist who has the art-world trifecta of a superb education in the historical facts of the case from Lascaux to Larry Gagosian's latest, a career of art-making hands-on technical experience and the unrelenting drive of a man obsessed with beauty and a desire to share it with the world. This is Cordt Holland's moment.

Cordt Holland is a signature 21st century artist. Holland's thorough art training at the avant garde hotbed: The San Francisco Art Institute, and his 40-year exploration of the major tropes of Western picture-making fuel his intensely private, sublime obsession with iconic talismanic totems of the mid-Cold War American dreamscape. Holland's deep understanding of oil painting technique, draftsmanship, color, composition and computer graphics, give Holland a powerful array of tools for his subtly erotic, zeit-defining image-making.

Over the past decades Holland has created more than a dozen masterworks that are as much post-structuralist philosophical statements at the intersection of Barthes, Baudrillard, Debord and Deleuze as they are references to Cezanne's destruction of the Renaissance picture plane, Braquasso's Cubism, Duchamp's reposition, and rhizomic Dada mind-scramble. Any one of Holland's works could fuel a semester of discussion in a graduate philosophy seminar at Harvard or Duke. Holland's Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles conflated with 50s pin-up icons Bettie Page, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg and the flashy motels and gas-guzzling luxury cars are the stuff of every swingin' Rat Pack wannabe's Las Vegas wet dream.

20th Century art historian and theorist Jim Blake has written about Mr. Holland’s work: