Films
Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked
James Jarvaise, Henry Taylor and the art of mentorship
- 27 June 2025
- Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked (2025). Directed by David Wirth
- Related Artist
- Henry Taylor
Many of us are lucky to have had that one mentor who saw our curiosity and talent, and taught us to recognize and forge it within ourselves. For Henry Taylor, that mentor was the late California modernist James Jarvaise (1924 – 2015). On the occasion of a new exhibition that brings the two artists together for the first time, Ursula visited the Jarvaise family home in Santa Barbara to hear from his son and daughter, Jean and Anna.
An artist and educator who received early recognition in Los Angeles for his abstract style of painting and collage, Jarvaise exhibited his work regionally and internationally and taught generations of students. He was included in the historic 1959 exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a critic at The New Yorker commended the “coolly green, strongly linear group of abstract oils called Hudson River School Series, all with landscape motifs, by James Jarvaise.”
James Jarvaise at Oxnard College © The Estate of James Jarvaise. Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth
James Jarvaise, Untitled (Figure Landscape), ca. 1963 © The Estate of James Jarvaise. Photo: Keith Lubow
“James Jarvaise is significant to me because he changed my life.”—Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor credits Jarvaise with encouraging him to apply to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) when Taylor was pursuing a range of interests at a local community college in the 1980s. “He opened me up to people like Dubuffet, de Kooning, Guston, Beckmann,” Taylor says. “I worked as a nurse at the state hospital from 3 p.m. to midnight. During the day, I was taking his class. I took his class for years and years. Finally, he said, ‘Henry, you’ve gotta stop taking my class and go to art school.’” With Jarvaise’s support, Taylor transferred to CalArts, where he earned his BFA in 1995.
Jarvaise’s influence went well beyond the canvas. “The man had incredible style,” Taylor recalls. His summers in Portugal, always returning with impeccable shoes. His Peugeot in the driveway—“I got one, too,” Taylor says. Jarvaise lived as he painted: deliberately, with flair. His home was more than a residence, it was “a painter’s paradise,” with “two houses, a studio like a chapel, all his work and a little wine bar.” After his passing, Taylor was invited into this private world. “My paintings were in his bedroom,” he says. “They gave me one of his.”
Henry Taylor, Untitled, 1990 © Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Keith Lubow
James Jarvaise, Untitled (The Fountain) , 1964 © The Estate of James Jarvaise. Photo: Keith Lubow
“He did say that: ‘An artist paints every day.’ And he was in his studio every day, all day.”—Anna Jarvaise
The unique dialogue between these two artists continues in Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition in downtown Los Angeles, where paintings and sculptures by Jarvaise and Taylor range from the 1950s through today. The exhibition’s title, “Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked,” borrows from a favorite maxim of Jarvaise, encapsulating not only a painterly philosophy but also the broader ethos Jarvaise imparted of integrity and intuition.
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“James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor: Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked” remains on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles through October 5, 2025.