Spend time with the Los Angeles painter Henry Taylor and you’ll hear a name repeated with such single-minded conviction, it can feel as if he’s trying to rouse a spirit. Jarvaise. The painting teacher who took an interest in his work in the 1980s, when Taylor was a hapless student trying to figure out what to do with his life. Jarvaise. Who prodded Taylor to quit hanging around community college and enroll at the California Institute of the Arts. Jarvaise. The paternal figure Taylor might call at 2 in the morning when he was feeling sentimental.
Taylor is now renowned for the imaginative ways he has captured Black life on canvas. In 2022, he was the subject of a critically acclaimed survey that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet even at these altitudes, he has never stopped the mononymic conjuring of Jarvaise.
“There are a lot of people that teach karate, but they’re not Bruce Lee,” Taylor says. “Jarvaise was Bruce Lee.”
Jarvaise is James Jarvaise, the Southern California painter (he died in 2015) who taught not just Taylor, but generations of area artists — including the painter and critic Peter Plagens, the painter Charles Arnoldi and the sculptor Robert Therrien. In 1959, Jarvaise was also one of three Californians to be featured in “Sixteen Americans,” an influential survey organized by Dorothy Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he presented a series of abstracted landscapes that distilled mountains and sky into elegant experiments in color and line. But unlike artists in the show who went on to prominence, including Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly, Jarvaise didn’t achieve similar renown, choosing to remain in California at a time when the art world orbited around New York.
Taylor’s continuous invocation of Jarvaise has now summoned his mentor into view. On Sunday, Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles will open “James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor: Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked,” which gathers almost seven dozen works produced over several decades by both painters. (The show runs through Oct. 5.)
On display will be portraits by Taylor, including one of Jarvaise that shows the elder artist looking low-key cool in sunglasses and long hair before a background of brilliant yellow. It will also feature works from Jarvaise’s various bodies of work, including the Hudson River School series that was displayed in “Sixteen Americans.” The show, Taylor said, during an interview in the sunny courtyard at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown space, is about “paying homage to the creator.”
Ingrid Schaffner, a gallery curator who worked with Taylor on selecting pieces for the show, says the exhibition is an opportunity to revisit an artist who doesn’t fit into the pat categories of postwar art in Southern California. Jarvaise was not part of the “Cool School” scene at the famed Ferus Gallery in the 1950s that launched the career of Ed Ruscha; nor was he a conceptualist like John Baldessari, who helped turn Los Angeles into a hotbed for thought experiments in the ’70s.
“This is more of an American story,” Schaffner says. “Jarvaise is part of a generation educated on the G.I. Bill” — he served in the U.S. Army — “who then became the first generation of professional artists to enter colleges and universities, and he had a very sustaining and satisfying career as a professor.”
Beyond that, the show is an opportunity to observe the critical roles mentors play in an artist’s formation: transmitting skills, encouraging fearlessness and perhaps picking up the phone at 2 in the morning.
Early in June, Taylor leads me into a gallery at Hauser & Wirth, where paintings by him and his mentor lean against walls, awaiting installation. The two are very different artists — Jarvaise was primarily an abstractionist, Taylor is known for the ways he can capture the essence of a person with a few strokes of paint.
But look closely at their work and you find strands of shared DNA. Jarvaise’s “Man in the Room” series from the 1960s featured shadowy figures constructed out of bold swaths of color — works that share a resonance with some of Taylor’s portraits, which are more about conveying a person’s body language than the exact contours of a face. In addition, both have used color in unusual ways. An undated work by Jarvaise shows a reclining figure rendered in bright orange, while a 2025 study of the musician Pharrell Williams by Taylor, captures Williams’s face and hair in black, purple and green.
For Taylor, seeing his work alongside Jarvaise’s is like discovering tiny pieces of himself. “It’s like going to synagogue and seeing somebody that looks like you,” he says. “Like, damn!”
Taylor met Jarvaise at Oxnard College in Oxnard, a naval and agricultural town about 90 minutes northwest of Los Angeles. Previously, Jarvaise had taught at Occidental College and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. But by the ’80s, when Taylor showed up, he was leading the fine arts department at Oxnard and living in Santa Barbara, where he had transformed an old ballet studio into a bucolic compound for his family. (Studded with fruit trees and gurgling fountains and featuring quirks like vintage doors rescued from architectural salvage, its charms may have kept Jarvaise from moving to New York.)
When they met, Taylor’s artistic training consisted largely of an etching class he had taken at a community college in the Bay Area. He ultimately returned to Oxnard, the city where he grew up, unsure of what to do next. Journalism intrigued him, but so did art. At the time, he was making small watercolors, which he carried around in a binder in his backpack. As he recalls: “I didn’t really have a lot of materials.”
When Taylor signed up for a painting class with Jarvaise, he had no idea who Jarvaise was or that his work resided in major museum collections, including the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But he became motivated by his professor, who took the time to walk through what worked and what didn’t in a given work — and taught him that making art was as much about making as it was about unmaking. “It’s like a math problem,” Taylor says. “You get the scribbles, you gotta erase and then you gotta go back. He always told me, ‘You can’t be in a hurry.’”
Anna Jarvaise, one of Jarvaise’s five children, now shares the family compound with her younger brother Jean Jarvaise, and together they manage their father’s estate. She remembers her dad’s excitement over Taylor’s skill. “He’d say, ‘I have this kid, and he is so good,’” she recalls. “He had so many students, but he was really excited about Henry.”
The feeling was mutual: Taylor took Jarvaise’s class repeatedly — until his teacher pushed him to apply to CalArts, a gesture Taylor found “validating.” But even after he began attending CalArts, Taylor would still return to Oxnard to present his work to Jarvaise for critique. “I would drive all my paintings in my step van,” he remembers. “I’d put them up against the building,” adding, “He would tell if it was right or if I needed to change anything. Then I’d be like, OK, now I’m ready. He gave me a lot of confidence.”
Louis Stern, a Los Angeles gallerist who knew Jarvaise and exhibited works from his Hudson River School series in 2012, described a man who was soft-spoken, witty and approachable. “You don’t always have true teachers,” he says. “You have people who teach to pay the rent. Jarvaise was a true teacher.”
After he graduated from CalArts in 1995, Taylor stayed in touch with his teacher. In the Jarvaise family archive are letters Taylor wrote to him. In one, he tells him about traveling to Switzerland for Art Basel. In another, he invites Jarvaise to his 2008 solo show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). On the back, he wrote in large letters, “I’m workin!” — to indicate that he was painting religiously.
In 2014, a year before Jarvaise died, Taylor appeared at one of the family’s Bastille Day parties in Santa Barbara. (Jarvaise had French heritage on his father’s side and often took to the kitchen to whip up traditional French meals.) Jean recalls Taylor and his father getting into a deep confab about painting. “I’ll always remember he said, ‘Henry, sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’” — the phrase that now serves as the title of the show.
In order to fix something, you may have to break it.
As he circles the gallery, Taylor gestures at a work from Jarvaise’s “Série Noire,” a series from the 1970s and ’80s that consists largely of abstractions in black that bear traces of rust-colored geometric forms. Taylor scrutinizes a corner where Jarvaise had painted over an earlier shape in black paint — what once existed remaining only as a ghostly texture on the surface of the canvas.
“That’s what he taught me,” Taylor says. “Don’t be afraid. Wipe it out. Start over. … You can make it better.”
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