Of the Blues: Carolina Shout (1974), collage, mixed media. Collection Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Purchase: NEA & Charlotte Debutante Club Fund. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

If visual art could have a soundtrack— and a rhythm—it would likely be found in the work of Romare Bearden. The groove of Duke Ellington’s jazz beat and the syncope of Louis Armstrong’s improvised trumpet riffs are captured, but barely tamed, in the multi-layered, often surreal imagery of Bearden’s Harlem street scenes. Today, the foundation representing the life and work of Romare Bearden, and the city’s Studio Museum in Harlem, with a growing collection of his paintings, prints and collages on permanent display, sit just blocks away from the famed Apollo Theater, in the heart of New York’s Harlem neighborhoods. On a sun-lit January day, I navigated the broad, busy streets of the city at the intersection of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard (Seventh Ave.)—once the epicenter of an unfolding drama for African-Americans pursuing the American dream—to meet with the team at the Romare Bearden Foundation and learn more about this towering figure of 20th century art. artes fine arts magazine

Romare Bearden in studio, 1980. Background: photo of great grandparents (also Duke Ellington's grandparents). Photo: Frank Stewart

The Harlem Renaissance would not have been the same without the inclusion of the Bearden family. Son of a well-educated and economically successful black family from the South, prevailing Jim Crow laws made life increasingly difficult in their home state of North Carolina. As a result, Bearden, at age three, became part of the Great Migration north, settling in New York City in 1914. There, his mother, Bessye was a social and political activist and New York correspondent for the African-American newspaper, Chicago Defender; while his father, Howard, worked as a city sanitation inspector, played the piano in his off-hours, and, according to Bearden’s close friend, author Ralph Ellison, was “a teller of tales.” Their lives were centered in the intellectual, artistic, and political mainstream of the burgeoning Harlem intellectual community of the time: among their friends were writer Countee Cullen; musician and cousin, Duke Ellington; actor, activist, and athlete Paul Robeson; the founder-president of the National Council of Negro Women, Mary McLeod Bethune; and the first African-American surgical intern at Harlem Hospital, Dr. Aubré de L. Maynard.

Bearden’s early interest in art and, specifically cartooning, was sparked by experiences during a year of studies in science and mathematics at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Bearden went on to study art and art education, including two years at Boston University, and took courses with German-born artist George Grosz at the Art Students League, finally graduating with a degree in education from New York University. There he had been a lead cartoonist and then art editor for the college’s monthly journal The Medley. The first of his many journal covers was published during his university years as well as the first of numerous texts he would write on social and artistic issues. Between 1935 and 1937 he was a weekly editorial cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American.

The Visitation (1941),mixed media on brown paper. Courtesy: Romare Bearden Foundation and VAGA, NY

Decades later, author (Invisible Man [1947-52]) and activist, Ralph Ellison—a life-long friend—wrote of Bearden’s earlier work in an introduction to a 1968 exhibition of paintings and Projections in Albany, NY. There he described Bearden rendering scenes from the Depression in a style influenced by the Mexican muralists (e.g. social activist and Marxist-leaning, Diego Rivera). “This work was powerful, the scenes grim and brooding, and through his depiction of unemployed workingmen in Harlem he was able, while evoking the Southern past, to move beyond the usual protest painting of that period to reveal something of the universal elements of an abiding human condition. By striving to depict the times, by reducing scene, character and atmosphere to a style, he caught both the universality of Harlem life and the harlemness of the national human predicament” [Ellison:676].

Employed by the New York City Department of Social Services, Bearden worked as an artist in his studio on weekends and evenings. He had his first solo exhibition in Harlem in 1940 and his first solo show in a major mainstream gallery (in Washington, D.C.) in 1944. Additionally, his work was exhibited in Paris before the end of the decade. Bearden enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, was assigned to the all-black 372nd Infantry Division until war’s end. During the late 1940s, his work was shown at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in Manhattan, which also represented prominent artists, like Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, and Robert Motherwell.

Untitled (verso image), ca. 1947-48, watercolor, mixed media. Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries, Bearden Foundation and VAGA, NY.

In 1950, Bearden used the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, France, for several months. There he studied literature, philosophy, Buddhism, and spent many hours in museums, not only in France but in Italy and Spain, as well. Back in New York, he returned to his job at the Department of Social Services where he worked through 1969.

In that same 1968 essay, Ellison recalls Bearden’s growth as an artist during this period as he had, “…become interested in myth and ritual as potent forms for ordering human experience, and … by stepping back from the immediacy of the Harlem experience—which he knew both from his boyhood and as a social worker—he was freed to give expression to the essentially poetic side of his vision. The products of this period were […] brightly sensual. And despite their having been consciously influenced by the compositional patterns of the Italian primitives and the Dutch masters, these works were also resolutely abstract” [Ellison:676]. It was at this stage in his career that he expanded on his new artistic vocabulary, with its own organizational rules, but with a unifying philosophy incorporating the union of rituals and myths binding cultures and generations. Bearden named this philosophy the ‘Prevalence of Ritual’ and it served as the unifying force in his art for the remainder of his career—serving as a bridge between Black culture and universal truth.

In the Garden (1974), serigraph. Courtesy: Wiggin & Dana Collection, Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Placing artist, Romare Bearden and author, Ralph Ellison in the same narrative framework speaks volumes of their shared concerns for the representation of the image of African-Americans on the ‘canvas’ of history. In Invisible Man, Ellison explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black male in the New York City of the 1930s. Through his protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is “invisible” in a figurative sense, in that “people refuse to see” him, and also experiences a series of alienating encounters. Ellison, like Bearden drew from a creative source that was passionate, well-educated, articulate and self-aware. And like Ellison, his artistic ‘voice’ expanded in range and thematic focus in the 1940s and beyond refining and expanding his working style, becoming more confident as an artist with something important to say. But, while prepared to give Bearden his due as a skilled member of the New York artistic community, critics and gallerists of the day saw little reason to distinguish his idiosyncratic paintings from the host of other artists caught up in the Abstract Expressionist movement, followed later by Minimalism and the Pop Art style, dominating the New York gallery scene in the two decades following the war.

It was only in 1964, at the age of 53, that Bearden abruptly abandoned his non-objective oil painting and began to produce collages. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, New York City, would write for a Bearden retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1991), “[They were] works filled with cryptic figures and a dense symbolism that looked like nothing else in American art. Having lived with a number of different ideas of art, he had come back to the subject matter he had stated out with—Black American life as he remembered it in the South on his childhood in North Carolina, and in the North of his coming of age in Pittsburgh and Harlem and, later in life, the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Bearden’s use of collage made everything in his career up to then, seem to have been a restless search culminating in his discovery of collage and rediscovery of the value of his own life and culture. It was like an aging explorer who finally had stumbled upon the shores of a new, long-sought territory, and, for the next twenty-five years until his death in 1988, Bearden set out to explore this new world and in his words to ‘establish a world through art in which the validity of my negro experience would live and make its own logic’” [Campbell:8].

Prevalence pf Ritual: Conjur Woman (1964), collage, mixed media. Courtesy: Romare Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

In parallel fashion, Ellison had sought verbal constructs and fictional encounters (highly symbolized, but bearing oblique similarities with contemporaneous events and people in 1940s Harlem) and for his nameless protagonist in Invisible Man. The author, assured over decades of the artist’s kindred spirit, would describe Bearden’s images as, “abiding rituals and ceremonies of affirmation.” And like Ellison’s writings from the same period, according to Conwill, “Bearden’s own phrase, the ‘Prevalence of Ritual,’ underscored the continuity of a culture’s ceremonies, marking the traditions and values that connect one generation to another, ceremonies that are universal, archetypal in their forms. Instead of painting mere genre scenes—the exterior landscape of events and people—Bearden chose to penetrate the interior of the lives he portrayed and, having pierced the skin of those day-to-day lives, connect his people and events to larger, more universal themes”[Campbell:9].

Also like Ellison’s writings, Bearden found in the medium of collage a methodology that allowed him to assimilate much of his life experience. His social conscience ran deep and he sought in his work a way to make pictures that transcended social propaganda. From rural landscapes capturing the images of utter poverty and his memories of tenant farmers and conjure women to crowded Harlem street scenes where an undertow of tension and pent-up violence seems palpable and omnipresent; to smoke-filled and ebullient jazz sessions, where music becomes the salve for lives lived in the shadow of despair, Bearden seems to possess the visual lexicon for it all. Black popular culture theoretician, Stuart Hall, describes the environment that Bearden captures through his art as, “a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are habitually used to map it out: High and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization”[Hall:28].

Pittsburgh Memory (1964), collage. Courtesy: Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Critic, Thelma Golden claims that Bearden’s art “is situated within the space created by these binaries. By revealing the tension between these opposites, he opens the dialogue for further understanding of black culture. Bearden’s work can only be fully understood as the product of the formal, structural, thematic, and historical motivations” [Golden:40]. Art historian and critic, Gail Gelburd, lends credence to this view by pointing out that Bearden eschewed the concerns of his contemporaries, as they sought to promulgate social change through their creative efforts, by adopting a decidedly apolitical role. “Bearden, who spent his early career making political cartoons and who studied the politically-oriented work of his one-time teach, George Grosz…went on to develop his Projections and Photomontages as the articulation of his attitudes as an artist toward political and social upheaval” [Gelburd:20].

Returning to the Ellison essay accompanying Bearden’s 1968 exhibit, this life-long friend of the artist spoke eloquently to his purpose by underscoring his decision to interpret the world artistically, and not confront it through propaganda or sentimentality. Ellison claimed that Western values regarding the significance of art and those artists producing it was largely defined by mainstream culture, rendering the techniques and history behind Negro artistic endeavors irrelevant. In other words, racial separatism was , until that time, defining the place of black artists and writers in the Pantheon of history by largely dismissing them. Ellison reported that Bearden would observe, “’Turn Picasso into a Negro and then let me see how far he can go,’ because he feels an irremediable conflict between his identity as a member of an embattled social minority and his freedom as an artist” [Ellison:675].

Patchwork Quilt (1970), mixed media. Collection MoMA; Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

While not overlooking the complexity of the challenge facing Bearden during the formidable years of the 1960s and beyond, he was confronted by the perplexing question of how to bring his art to bear in the context of largely-abstracted, post-modernist trends and a Eurocentric cultural playing field? On the task of defining Negro-American identity—pressing his claim for recognition from the inside, as it were—while still remaining true to his heritage, Bearden ‘s work evolved in very personal ways by remaking the visual representation of the black face. By personifying and particularizing the form and figure of Negro men and women through his collage work, he was able to synthesize an identity steeped in heritage and hardship, but elevated by his subtle visual cues of composition and motif, honed by years of classical arts study and training. According to art historian, Robert O’Meally, (addressing the ‘flatness’ found in Bearden’s collages as evidence, in part, of African and Asian influences) “looked backward to ancient as well as to early 20th century cubist and non-objective painting, as he created a unique body of art in his own idiomatic style”[O’Meally:21]. While Ellison’s Invisible Man went unnamed throughout the novel, and for whom the act of being seen, or revealed, was both an ongoing struggle and an act of defiance, Bearden’s multi-layered and often surreal figures offer a reconfigured visual representation of the Black America he knew and invited all viewers, irrespective of race, to integrate into their pre-conceived notions.

Spring Way (1964), collage. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Bearden’s photomontages represent a juxtaposition of image fragments and textures, literally torn from the publications of the day, combined with handmade papers and surface treatments employed by the artist for dramatic effect. By destabilizing preconceptions of ‘blackness’ and re-assembling them in ways that alter the message, Bearden succeeds in transforming and redefining Hall’s ‘polarities’ into a powerful alloy—one that offers unexpected strength and resilience to black identity. While his images ultimately reside outside the realm of the traditional, familiar fragmented compositional elements and thematic motifs allow the viewer to connect to the work and consider this new ‘language’ without having to fictionalize or romanticize the messaging or the messenger (viz. Ellison, “…destroying the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen). According to Kimberly Lamm, who compared and contrasted the work of Ellison and Bearden in the context of black male identity, Images of different individuals are spliced together to make a representation of one person, calling attention to the restless and continual construction of cultural perception, image, and subjectivity. Indeed, Bearden’s figures are never completely revealed—never completely visible or invisible—but suggest instead the inter-subjective, inter-collective, and continual process of identity construction” [Lamm:822-23]. She adds, “It is Bearden’s attention to individual acts of looking that links [his] disparate figures into a loose-knot cultural cohesion. […] What Bearden divulges is a restless drama of construction and deconstruction that continually complicates [Ellison’s] binaries of visibility and invisibility, continually rejects and redefines visual forms that ‘document’ the complexity of black culture into fixed perpetual forms” [Lamm:824]. In Ellison’s essay on Bearden, he refers to this as, “[Bearden’s] agonizing fixation upon the racial mysteries and social realities dramatized by color, facial structure and the texture of negro skin and hair” [Ellison:677].

This critique began by drawing parallels between Bearden’s creative output and the jazz music that was so much a part of his life and times. With a clearer understand of the nature of his creative output, it is instructional to consider the influence that music played in the artist’s life. Here too, a strong bond existed between Bearden and Ralph Ellison on the significance of the black musical idiom in an evolving cultural identity. Ellison called it “the poetry of the blues…projected through synthetic forms,’’ many of which regularly found their way into Bearden’s work. Not merely a tragic-comic narrative style that could act as a source of entertainment or group identification, music for Bearden was an integral part of how he viewed the creative process. For him, his collages were jazz performances frozen in time.

A Portrait of Max: In Sounds, Rhythms, Colors and Silences (1985). Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries, Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

According to Diedre Harris-Kelly—‘Uncle Romie’ to her—“Bearden himself insisted that he structured his paintings and collages as if they were jazz compositions.” She explains that Bearden had a life-long interest in music and, in fact, took up songwriting because he thought it might allow his to earn enough money to return to Paris to continue studying art. “He did publish about twenty songs, even managing to get a hit, Seabreeze, a romantic ballad recorded by Billie Eckstine in 1954” [Harris-Kelly:250].

But when we think of Bearden, we think of jazz. Harris-Kelly tells me that he structured his art like the music he listened to. Like jazz, his collage work was layered and fractured like the music, but always made into a unified whole. “This layering was both literal and metaphorical—becoming a powerful commentary on black culture. In her article, Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation, she notes that, “Given his broad knowledge of American culture, it seems logical to me that he was thinking of the fundamentals of this very radical, very modern American music and how it could be applied to his work. In an article by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker , he said, ‘I take a sheet of paper and just make lines while I listen to records…a kind of shorthand to pick up the rhythm and intervals. He said that American cubist painter Stuart Davis listened to jazz musician Earl Hines for the intervals. Hines made the pauses between notes into something important. The silences were as expressive as the sounds’” [Harris-Kelly:250-1].

The Block (1971), collage, mixed media. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Of Uncle Romie’s creative process, Harris-Kelly says, “I doubt Bearden was only thinking about rhythm and silences between the notes.” In a piece like The Block, “…I think of the buildings in tonal terms—I see the pink building on the left sounding a chord in the high register; it moves to the gray, deeper tone; then the lighter gray; to the dynamic phrase in the middle—all as one instrument. So I think Bearden was talking about intervals moving through different pitches. […] I think he put those brilliant colors down because he knew he was going to chop them up. He knew that he would lay other things down on top and was performing improvisation more like a conductor than a single instrumentalist. When I think of him listening to Earl Hines and talking about the spaces, I think he’s the piano player playing this phrase, and then he leaves a space, plays another set of notes, followed by another section…he is the leader of a big band, pulling some instruments in and easing others back” [Harris-Kelly:253].

The Piano Lesson (1983), mixed media. Courtesy Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Harris-Kelly recalls Bearden’s describing his process to create Piano Lesson: “I’ve seen some of Goya’s paintings where the underneath ground predominated over half the painting, and then he would, say, weave a certain blue color here and develop those things that he wanted to highlight. So I would let the ground play through and then what I put there, the thing I lay down, I try to put in proportion to the overall size- in the same ratio. And then in this, I did something that I don’t usually do. You see I tipped it to lay the piano in a kind of perspective going this way, and to compensate for that, I had to bring things back onto the frontal plane”[Harris-Kelly:254].

In a 1983 essay (five years before Bearden’s death), Michelle Wallace asks, Why Are There No Great Black Artists? Playing to Ellison’s disquisition regarding the propensity for society to conceal the black man “by time, by custom, and by our trained incapacity to perceive the truth,” she cautions that while, “images of blackness are ubiquitous in American culture, African-American visual artists are, for the most part, critically and institutionally ignored, resulting in a mostly invisible black visuality” and as Lamm notes in her comments on Wallace’s essay, “an imprecise, undertheorized account of the way images of race transform so swiftly into well-known rhetorics and myths. Surprisingly Wallace argues that visual artists have been occluded by the cultural emphasis on African-American music, which she describes as the ‘the founding discourse of African-American experience’” [Wallace:344].

Wallace states, “I am at war with music, to the extent that it completely defines the parameters of intellectual discourse in the African-American community.” Serving as a metaphor for African-American artistic production, “[it] stifles and represses most of the potential for understanding the visual in African-American culture” [Wallace:345]. Lamm notes that, “Wallace’s claim acquires even more significance when we consider that one of the most prevalent visual representations of the black male is the image of the musician” [Lamm:818].

Sound of Jazz (ca. 1985), monotype. Courtesy Swann Auction Galleries; Bearden Foundation & VAGA, NY.

Yet Ellison, who was such an admirer of Bearden, frequently relied on music as a metaphor in Invisible Man to underscore the improvisational, dynamic compositional features of black identity, linked to the search for visibility and cultural authenticity in a hostile, manipulative world. While hidden in a coal cellar, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist claims, in the novel’s prologue, “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’ all at the same time. One recording won’t do. When I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body.” This musical theme becomes the leitmotif for the entire novel as he variously appropriates, attempts to transform, subverts, or succumbs to—slowly recognizing that it is an established order from which there can be no real escape. But Ellison, like Bearden, recognized that jazz also had redemptive value—a malleable apparatus that served as a springboard for enhanced self-awareness and symbolic cultural cohesion; its curative powers inchoate in the very nature of its fluidity and re-inventiveness.

Diedre Harris-Kelly issues a cautionary note regarding what she refers to as “the easy analogy between playing jazz and making visual art. While I do think there are profound links between Bearden’s approach to collage and jazz improvisation, I also think the analogy doesn’t account for differences in genre and technique. By not accounting for these differences, we risk obscuring more about Bearden’s process than we might reveal. We might even miss what is most ‘jazzlike’ about his work”[Harris-Kelly:249].

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

*All Bearden Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

__________________________________

Works Cited:

Campbell , Mary Schmidt. “History and the Art of Romare Bearden,” in Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem; Oxford University Press (1991).

Ellison, Ralph, “The Art of Romare Bearden,” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, (Winter 1977), pgs 673-680.

Gelburd, Gail and Thelma Golden. Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections 1964. New York” Whitney Museum of American Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York (1997).

Harris-Kelly, Diedra. “Revisiting Romare Bearden’s Art of Improvisation,” in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards & Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ed. New York: Columbia University Press (2004).

Lamm, Kimberly. “Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Romare Bearden’s Photomontages,” Calaloo, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2003), pgs 813-835.

O’Meally, Robert G. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. New York: D C Moore Gallery (2007).

Works Referenced:

Anderson-Spivy, Alexandra. Romare Bearden: A Modern Classic. New York: ACA Galleries (1991).

Fine, Ruth and Jacqueline Francis, Ed. Romare Bearden: American Modernist. Washington: National Gallery of Art & Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (2011)

Fine, Ruth, et.al. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington: National Gallery of Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York (2003).

Willem de Kooning, Woman III (1953). Private Collection

 “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”  —Willem de Kooning

They say that autumn is the time when the boundary between the living and the dead; worldly and other worldly; waking and dreaming; and the conscious and unconscious mind, is minimal. If so, the moment is right to look at Willem de Kooning’s layered retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Works are scraped, drawn, pastel filled and painted to elicit the passage of time, and in describing origins, merge the seen and unseen, and what no longer exists. In this space, the artist has poured himself throughout a lifetime of intertwining, which appears, like DNA in the final galleries. There can be no more graphic depiction of the intimate autobiographical workings of a man within his time…but also without time. artes fine arts magazine

W. de Kooning, Special Delivery (1946). Coll. Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Gallery, Wash., D.C.

DeKooning’s permeable works — figurative within abstractions, then abstractions at the end of his life that danced away like figures – lodge in the psyche. Once characterized as out of step with his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionist of the New York School, de Kooning’s work conveys the sensation that everyone else was out of sync. His oeuvre was more personally exploratory, iconoclastic and multiple in approach than a movement. The art critic Thomas Hess wrote of de Kooning’s 1946 work, Special Delivery, “Shapes do not meet or overlap or rest apart as planes; rather there is a leap from shape to shape; the ‘passages’ look technically ‘impossible.’ This is a concept which comes from collage, where the eye moves from one material to another in similar impossible bounds. De Kooning often paints ‘jumps’ by putting a drawing into a work-in-progress, sometimes painting over it and then removing it, using it as a mask or template, sometimes leaving it in the picture.”

The most psychologically ambiguous works come midway through the exhibition in the seminal Women I, II, III series. Are they hostile? No. Are they kind? No. They resonate because they are the way that a woman can be. Never have I identified as closely with these paradoxes, or been clenched by as raw a visceral grip as through these paintings, whether viewing them for the first time, over twenty five years ago, for the duration of this show. Like the Archangel Michael, de Kooning’s Women carry the balance of heaven and hell, demon and goddess, both represented seductively in the schema of their personas.

(Left, near) Juan de la Abadia, St. Michael Weighing Souls(1490), Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunga, Barcelona, SP; (L,far) W. de Kooning, Woman with Bicycle (1952-53).

Of the Women series, de Kooning made references of a kind of transcendent influence: “First of all, I felt everything ought to have a mouth. Maybe it was like a pun…maybe it’s even sexual…I don’t know why I did it with the mouth. Maybe the grin. It’s rather like the Mesopotamian idols, you know. They always stand up straight looking to the sky with this smile, like they were just astonished about the forces of nature, you feel – not about the problems they had with one another.” The gaze is otherworldly.

Hess analyzed de Kooning’s works for their process and for their armature, particularly since in the case of the drawings Woman (Seated Woman I) and Untitled (Two Women), the narrative was essentially unfathomable. He said, “The vectors of the drawing seem to have become the parts of a giant watchworks which tick around the figure, hiding, revealing, then hiding her again as if she had become a part of time…perhaps some idea about the bending nature of space and time informs this image.”

W. de Kooning, Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother (c.1938).

The’ jump’, a visual and psychological synapse through the void, the convergence of space and time as well as its ‘bending’ all point to a non-linear universe by which de Kooning was compelled. In April of 1937, John Graham published an essay in, Magazine of Art, entitled; ‘Primitive Art and Picasso,’ where the artist and African sculpture were discussed in the context of Jungian psychoanalytic theory.  According to the chronology in John Elderfield’s brilliantly comprehensive exhibition catalog, de Kooning remembered borrowing this article from Jackson Pollock. That February Graham had published System and Dialectics in Art, which weighed the impact of Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious relative to art. A materialized unconsciousness appeared early in de Kooning’s Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother (c. 1938). The personal unconscious and collective consciousness later collided and manifested themselves in de Kooning’s Women. A more gender ambivalent dialogue between animus and anima appeared in Figure (1944). Preceding depictions of Men examined the subject, together with what was felt. The emotional content was wrought by eroded or compounded layers that created an aura of the mystical feminine around the sitter. The effect is one of memory – simultaneously past and contemplated – that evolved in Men, then the Women, and finally became decomposed and deconstructed in the landscape abstractions.

W. de Kooning, Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940.

Throughout this 200-work retrospective there are penetrating (early) and exhilarating (later) works. Undeniably, this is a landmark: it is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the artist’s entire oeuvre, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is its only venue. (de Kooning’s first one man exhibition, at Charles Egan Gallery, opened at the time of his forty-fourth birthday, so this delay is perhaps symmetrical.) Less subjective are the quantifications: approximately 16,000 square feet, or, the museum’s entire sixth floor gallery space is given over to de Kooning: A Retrospective. Among the artist’s most famous paintings, Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950) and the celebrated third Woman series are presented, together with breakthrough black and white compositions (1948-49), where one discovers that a line is not a line, but rather a Rorschach test.

Every period and medium with which the artist was engaged is present, including the largely unseen (no pun intended) theatrical back-drop, the 17-foot Labyrinth (1946). Equally unguarded and sweeping was Jerry Saltz’s seminal review in the September 20 issue of New York Magazine which he concluded by saying “I challenge any of them (the curators) to name one thing wrong with any work on view here. What we see, from beginning to end, is a cosmos unto itself, visual wisdom for the ages.”

W. de Kooning, Black Untitled (1948). Coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The show begins with the primordial soup of de Kooning’s early cosmos – the deep and dark amorphic oil on paper/cardboard mounted on wood compositions like Nightsquare (c. 1949) and Black Untitled (1948), which seem animated by ghostlike forces and which were informed by events such as seeing Merce Cunningham dance, evading the too literal metaphors of developing Surrealism, and experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima. These curvilinear works flourished with an expressionist infusion throughout the years. As witnessed by de Kooning’s academic representational still lifes that toy with volume and the figurative drawings that hint at alienation, de Kooning was always interested in more than meticulous rendering where he felt he would “loose his mind.” He alludes to dimensions beyond the seen, metaphysics, and a fascination with vortices of space. De Kooning said, “The stars I think about, if I could fly. I could reach in a few old fashioned days. But physicist’s stars I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are – that’s all the space I need as a painter.” Stars as buttons summons the transcendent William Blake, whose power is revisited here.

W. de Kooning, Untitled XII (1982)

Once the viewer has penetrated the vast waves and oceans that constituted the artist’s unmediated mind, and is treated to the less seen, heavy and gnarled sculpture, an epiphany occurs. When one steps into the bright light of the late works – these accomplished while the artist was in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease – refine, rework and cultivate anew a lyricism to express the formless form, the unembodied volume, the definite indefinite. As de Kooning climbed closer to his own white light, the palette becomes sublimely light, innocent and pure, the lines uncomplicated and devoid of gravitas.

Tony Vaccaro, de Kooning painting in East Hampton, L.I. studio (1953)

Theodor Adorno, the writer on classical music had this to say about de Kooning’s final epoch: “The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves, it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witness to the finite powerlessness of the ‘I confronted with Being’ are its final work.” de Kooning moved toward the infinite metaphorically, in afterlife; during life it was a concept he channeled and which sustained him.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer ©2011

The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through January 9, 2012

www.moma.org

Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror (1932). Collection MOMA

In late summer of 1948, a strange gathering took place on the top floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Distinguished men (all men) from the fields of arts, letters, academia and the publishing world were invited by LIFE Magazine to discuss and debate the then-current state of the “modern painting” movement. The Round Table—part of a magazine-sponsored series on the post-war American lifestyle—consisted of such notables as Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley; Clement Greenberg, avant-garde critic; Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Met; Sir Leigh Ashton, director of London’s Victoria & Albert; Meyer Shapiro, professor of fine arts at Columbia University; Alfred Frankfurter, editor and publisher of Art News; Charles Sawyer, of Yale’s art department and James Thrall Soby, chairman MOMA’s painting and sculpture department, among others.

LIFE’s objective was to allow free reign for this group of critics and connoisseurs to examine what the editors of the magazine called, “the strange art of today.” And, perhaps too, to begin to arbitrate on behalf of public taste and understanding, as the world’s attention shifted from war-torn Europe and the dominant cultural high-ground that Paris had occupied for decades, to the United States (and New York, in particular)with its loose-knit, and as yet, ill-defined, movement of experimental painters, sculptor and writers.

The magazine’s moderator, Russell Davenport, an avowed conservative, set the agenda:

“For about 40 years the art of painting has exhibited a variety of manifestations loosely identified in the public mind with the phrase ‘modern art.’ Originating in the works by such acknowledged masters as Cezanne, van Gogh, Seurat and Gauguin, these manifestations made their appearance in the studios of Paris in the first decade of this century, multiplied into a kaleidoscope of new artistic styles, found a kinship with a wide variety of intellectual currents and spread throughout the world wherever artist paint. Today they confront the visitor to almost any gallery as strange distortions of reality, private nightmares, depictions of ‘ugly’ things, human figures and objects that ‘look wrong,’ cubes and geometrical patterns that accord with nothing recognizable in nature. These ‘modern’ works do not, of course, constitute the whole of 20th century art. Many artists have remained quite unaffected by them, others have been influenced only during certain periods of their careers. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the ‘modern’ movement has constituted the dominant trend in the art of our time. It has been encouraged by important institutions. It has been promoted by art dealers. And it has left behind it so much controversy and confusion that a great part of the public has become antagonistic to contemporary painting.”

Jean Miro, Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird (1926). Collection MOMA

Reflecting on the ‘public mood’ Davenport goes on to say, “When the layman uses the phrase [modern art] he has in mind two particular characteristics which, for him, set this art off from more conventional painting. First of all, he finds it difficult to understand; secondly, he often finds that it does not concern itself with the ‘beautiful’ but with the ‘ugly or the strange.’ The layman is reassured to find that this kind of painting has drawn the fire of distinguished thinker. Arnold Toynbee, for example, has declared that modern art is symptomatic of a decay in moral values of our age; and in a well-know essay, Art and the Obvious, Aldous Huxley deplored the failure of much modern art to come to grips with what he called the ‘great obvious truths’ of human life.”

The complete story of Life’s Round Table discussion can be found on line, in the October 11, 1948 issue of the magazine. See: http://books.google.com/books?id=dEoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=true

While the debate is inconclusive, the struggle to come to terms with changing times—and America’s nascent role as an arbiter in the rapidly-shifting world of art—is fascinating to track in the varied opinions expressed by participants. It is truly a case of 19th century aesthetic values confronting mid-20th century sensibilities. Classical views meet modern values, with long-held traditional perspectives the most apparent victim.

As fascinating as the debate by the experts was, a check on the October, 1948, ‘Letters to the Editor” section of LIFE, weeks later, yields more in the way of a window on public attitude and the great divide that characterized the debate then (and perhaps, still does today). I have excluded the more banal supportive letters from readers and chose instead to include three critical correspondences, including that of a well-known, surprisingly vociferous and cantankerous voice from the Midwest:

Letters to the Editor

MODERN ART

Sirs:

As a psychiatrist of more than 40 years experience, I cannot refrain from commenting upon these examples of modern art and the discussion of such in the Life Round Table on Modern Art.

One of the most prevalent and malignant types of mental illness with which we, as psychiatrists, have been trying to cope with for years is the insidious disorder of the mind in which the main feature is a departure from the world of reality to one of fantasy.

Frequently patients who have withdrawn from the world of reality express their fantasies in drawings or paintings which are quite without meaning to a normal individual but which help diagnosis of the underlying conflict…

The so-called modernist representations illustrated in LIFE would seem to me to be in the same category and cannot be felt by anyone except the individual producing them, unless the person viewing them has the same subconscious, which is almost an impossibility.

It is generally conceded that no two individuals have the same store of subconscious memories. Consequently the individual fantasy of one particular artist means very little to another person. Reality is common to all, or at least can be appreciated by everyone, but fantasy is essentially individualistic.

It is quite normal for a young child to live in a world of make-believe. But to carry such fantasy into adult life is most assuredly not conducive to good mental health…

Chester Waterman, M.D.

Middletown, Conn.

_____________________________

Sirs:

…Mr. Sawyer [a member of the Round Table] has looked at Picasso’s, Girl before a Mirror for 15 years and he likes it. I am forcibly reminded of the picture which you published some time ago showing a boy walking past stacks of corpses near a concentration camp. He is so used to corruption that he didn’t even notice it…

Many of us accept the right of the artist to purge his emotions, but reserve the right to turn the other way when passing the pathological excrement. We can pass corpses and retain our sanity but we are confident that the Creator of the mind and soul of man did not intend, and will not allow, us to pass them unseeing. If the determination that nothing will make us enjoy either the sight or the odor constitutes intellectual stagnation and Victorianism—make the most of it.

Mary T. Abny

Upper Montclair, N.J.

Thomas Hart Benton, Self Portrait (1972). Private Collection

______________________________

Sirs:

LIFE’s Round Table certainly bolsters the Russian view that our contemporary Western art is illusory, decadent and given to an empty formulism utterly incapable of coming to grips with solid cultural meaning…

If that is the case no small part of the cause must be referred to the peculiar language habits of the esthetes who interpret art and who make our intelligent people so sick of it that they will give any opportunity to become culturally consequential. All of your participants seem to feel that the meaning or art should be as far from good sense as possible.

I find onl one sentence in the Round Table report which stands close scrutiny. My Taylor’s “fifty thousand people is a lot of people,” while it has a relative character, is a sentence which men and women who are not esthetes can take seriously…

Thomas Hart Benton

Kansas City, Mo.

Sprowl Bros. Lumber Yard, Searsmont, ME (1978-80), oil on canvas, 21 x 43 inches. All Downes images courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery, NY

The English-born artist Rackstraw Downes is finally, at the age of 71, having a long-overdue moment. After toiling for four decades making meticulous onsite paintings of landscapes, cityscapes and interiors – without the aid of a camera – Downes is enjoying his first major career retrospective. The stunning Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, which opened last summer at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island and then traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, is now taking a victory lap at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C.

In addition, Downes’s New York dealer, Betty Cuningham, recently put together a 30-year survey of his drawings, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Ct., mounted a mesmerizing show that used a wealth of drawings, journals and paintings to reveal the arduous process that resulted in a three-part picture called, with Downes’s typically prosaic precision, Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street. fine arts magazine

Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The North River Water Pollution Control Plant (2008), oil on canvas, 19 x 45”

Only after coming under the spell of Downes’s art did I discover his writing, in the form of a slender volume, In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays From Three Decades, 1973, 1981, 1996, published by Edgewise Press in 2004. The best way to appreciate Downes’s achievements, as both artist and writer, might be to walk through his career by walking through this bewitching little book’s three essays.

1. What the Sixties Meant to Me (1973)

The reader is immediately aware that Downes is no literary dabbler. He received a degree in English literature at Cambridge before coming to America to study art at Yale in the early 1960s, and he’s deeply familiar not only with literature and art but also with history, criticism, art history, philosophy and, for good measure, meteorology and the movies. His writing is clear, colloquial and insightful, not only in this volume but also in the introductory essay he wrote for Fairfield Porter: Art In Its Own Terms, a 1979 collection of critical essays by one of Downes’s heroes.

At Yale, under the influence of his teacher Al Held, Downes made hard-edged abstract paintings that left him deeply dissatisfied. He felt that the 1960s art world was being hijacked by money and Marxist critics. It was, he writes, ” a decade that could hardly have ended soon enough for me.”

Fairfield Porter, View of Barred Island (1970), Private collection

But he began to see a way out. He found himself drawn to such figurative painters as Porter, Alex Katz and Neil Welliver, who had started out as abstractionists, like Downes, and were now flying solo and blind against the prevailing winds. “In this sense they were moderns,” Downes writes, “that is to say, artists who do not share or observe an inherited body of knowledge, skills, or critical precepts, or specified aims. (It was Picasso who, I believe rightly, identified working in solitude and so sharing no goals, as the common denominator of the Post-Impressionists, the founders of modern art.)”

Since they lacked an inherited tradition, these artists turned, naturally, to the past. “Each had to invent his own ‘tradition,’ his own version of art’s aristocracy…” Downes writes. “Therefore the past was something to discover, as much of a frontier as California to a train of covered wagons. It had then the typically American attraction of starting from scratch.” Perhaps only a non-American student of literature and history could have written that last sentence. Or these: “For art, all the arts, are constantly looking to the past for help and inspiration. Indeed the great inventors in music and literature as well as the plastic arts have as a rule been revivalists too… Whenever art begins to feel boxed in, its norms and canons hardened, its criticism regulatory, it might be taken as commonplace that artists look to the past for help.”

Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The Bike Path No.1 (2009), oil on canvas, 19 x 65”

Again, Downes’s literary training comes through when he describes what he was trying to do: “I wanted to get rid of style, art, artiness, everything extra. I think this is what Stendahl meant when he said that every morning before writing on The Charterhouse of Parma he would read a few pages of the Civil Code.” Downes cites E.M. Forster as another writer who got at truth by stripping artiness from his prose. After quoting the famous opening sentence of Howards End – “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” – Downes writes that Forster’s technique is “a way of cutting out the pompous, the pretentious, the grandiose, the overweight… It’s a method, in other words, of intellectual accuracy, of emotional accuracy; it says, ‘A little deflation, if you don’t mind please, in the interest of no false statements.’”

In the mid-1960s Downes saw a show by that great painter of the natural world, Charles Burchfield, “whose work combined the vision of the romantic poet with that of the naturalist. It is a vision that reads nature, for whom a wildflower is not a spot of color but a sign, revealing nature’s processes… Following Burchfield, I tried to see the landscape as including legible stories as well as combinations of form and qualities of light.”

Charles Birchfield, September wind and Rain (1949), Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

By the late 1960s, Downes was poised for his breakthrough. Essentially, he wanted to do what writers do: make art from nature that told stories. But which stories? The answer came to him on a trip to Holland, where he was mesmerized by the narratives that teemed inside the borders of a single small canvas. His notebook reads: “Breughel’s ‘Toren von Babel’ reverses the scheme of the Impressionist and grand manner painters on whom I was reared…a thousand stories in every square inch…it is equivalent to two or three books of The Odyssey…. In every doorway (the largest is an inch and a half high) there are upwards of 20 figures, all doing something…an extensive ship-building industry…a merchant and fighting navy…a building on fire…woodchoppers…many thousands of cattle and sheep…”

Breughel has created an epic by fusing and playing against each other “the contemporary and the mythical, the literary, and the pictorial.” He has also created “a symbol of hubris, of man too big for his boots.”

Pieter Breugel, Tower of Babel (1563), o/c, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Downes had arrived at his subject, one worthy of any storyteller: hubris, man too big for his boots. “A modest sense of our place in relation to the whole is the lesson we, with our power to upset it, have yet to learn,” he writes. After a decade of wandering, Downes had found his way.

2. What Realism Means To Me (1981)

The book’s second essay, an attempt to understand what realism is and how it works, draws heavily on the lessons of writers, from Shakespeare to Gibbon, Forster, Chekhov, Stendahl, Dickens and Maupassant, among others. Downes, a reader with catholic tastes, even invokes the Michelin travel guide for New York City, which advises French tourists to stand outside the Wall Street subway station at 4:45 p.m. to witness that daily tsunami of humanity known as le rush hour. This, Downes writes, is precisely what realist writers and artists do: “they look at the common, everyday aspects of life with the fresh, surprised interest and curiosity of the traveler in a foreign country.”

Downes admires Chekhov for believing the realist’s job is not to provide answers but to state questions correctly. “His artistry says, to judge is presumptuous, to generalize is glib,” Downes writes of Chekhov. “What counts is to observe intensely, and when you do so you feel not so much inclined to advocate your opinion.” This brings to mind Henry James’s advice to writers in his essay, The Art of Fiction: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

Chekhov, Downes goes on, “shines floods from all around; he shows events in their context like gold in the matrix. Differentiation between foreground and background disappears, and the real hero turns out to be the texture of life.”

Dunham’s Farm Pond (1972), oil on canvas, 16 x 21”

Two writers who fail to live up to this demanding definition of the realist, in Downes’s opinion, are Maupassant and Dickens. Maupassant’s method, Downes writes, is “to sieve, ferociously, till he has isolated one extremely compact, clear-cut action, often exemplifying an abstract quality which in turn sometimes serves for the story’s title – Imprudence or Regret.” Downes then quotes George Orwell’s dismissal of Dickens for his “habit of telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth.”

Downes wanted to paint big truths without sieving, without telling any lies, large or small. But the early figurative paintings he made in Maine – panoramas, cows in a pasture, birch trees, school playing fields – came off as picturesque and conventional, little more than a warm-up for the main event. At the beginning Downes made sketches outdoors, then returned to his studio to finish the paintings. Before long he began to question both his method and his work’s prettiness. As he told an interviewer, “Many of us moved (to Maine) because there were beautiful hills and mountains and cows and streams and so on. But when we build a house we call up the cement-mixer man who comes from a gigantic quarry where they get all the rock to make cement out of and pulverize it and turn it into cement. That is part of your life too. And I wanted to acknowledge that. I didn’t like the idea of landscape being an escapist genre, which it has the tendency to be.”

Downes, who is no fan of the Hudson River School, Ansel Adams or other prettifiers of the natural world, made a breakthrough on three fronts: he left the studio and did his painting onsite; he started painting unconventional subjects that had narrative as well as visual heft; and he stopped relying on traditional linear perspective, which has governed most figurative art since the early 15th century.

Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (2007), 'Manufactured Landscape' Series

Out went the cows and the ponds and the birch trees. In came quarries, landfills, lumber yards, scrap heaps, parking lots, oil fields, wastewater treatment plants, the underbellies of bridges and highway overpasses, anti-spectacular scenes that we usually pass without considering, or even noticing. This subject matter brings to mind another landscape artist, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who makes large-scale images of what he calls “manufactured landscapes” – marble quarries, tire dumps, baled scrap metal, oil fields, and the Third World business of dismantling the First World’s decommissioned oil tankers, an oddly beautiful bit of ugliness known as “shipbreaking.”

As Downes was preparing to give a talk at the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina shortly after his retrospective opened there, I asked him if he gets criticized for his subject matter. He replied: “As for beauty, people say to me, ‘Why do you paint such banal subjects? There’s nothing beautiful there.’ It’s not my job to paint something beautiful; it’s my job to make a beautiful painting of something. And that something is something that intrigues me. Sometimes it intrigues me because it’s very modest, very ordinary or very neglected – but I have to have good feelings about it.”

Most of Downes’s paintings, made in Texas and the industrial Northeast, are devoid of people, but they all tell stories that reveal man’s imprint on the natural world and, in a brilliant reversal, how the natural world responds. The science of optics informs all of this work. Downes wants to capture the raw data of the seen world – not the “corrected” version after our brains have processed what comes through our eyes. “I want to paint exactly the way something is,” he has said. And so his horizons bend, his bridges curve, his power lines wiggle, his skyscrapers tilt. The effect is ravishing, visually and intellectually. You feel like a tourist seeing, truly seeing, the everyday aspects of life for the first time.

U.S. Scrap Metal Gets Shipped for Reprocessing in Southeast Asia, Jersey City (1994), oil on canvas

We’re back to Breughel, and hubris, and the story of man getting too big for his boots. One Downes painting in the retrospective that tells this story particularly well is called U.S. Scrap Metal Gets Shipped for Reprocessing in Southeast Asia, Jersey City (1994). The painting is 10 feet long and just 16 inches tall, a favored Downes format. In the foreground is a rotting pier that once supported a pipeline that fed oil from tankers to refineries on the shore. Across an estuary, dominating the right half of the canvas, great cones of scrap metal are being loaded onto barges, which will ferry the stuff to anchored ships, which will carry it to Asia, where it will be reborn as refrigerators and automobiles. In the middle distance, slightly to the left of center, a new condominium development rises at water’s edge, the shiny fruit of global commerce. And on the far left, off in the distance, stands the World Trade Center, where the deals are made that move the waste, finance the condos and import the cars. Downes, like Breughel, has created an epic by fusing the contemporary and the mythical, the literary, and the pictorial.

I asked him about the importance of storytelling in his painting. “It’s very important to me,” he said, “and I think it is to everybody’s landscape painting. I think it’s a shame to think of landscape painting as some sort of abstractness. It’s not. It often does tell a story. I seek out those stories I’m intrigued by.”

Rackstraw Downes, Untenanted Space in the World Trade Center - Winter Sun (1998), oil on canvas, 24 x 56”

The World Trade Center also figures, more eerily, in some of Downes’s interiors. A few years before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artists into vacant office spaces in the Twin Towers to paint the heart-stopping views out the windows. The views didn’t interest Downes, but the “strange, empty, desolate air” of the unoccupied offices did. He painted a daytime scene that’s nearly abstract, just receding horizontal slabs of sunlight on the floor a big empty box of a room. He also painted a nighttime scene of an equally desolate space lit by a few stray fluorescent lights. The paintings tell a shrewd story about a pair of soulless, superfluous monstrosities that were never fully occupied and never embraced by critics or the public. The buildings were an aesthetic failure and, perhaps worse for such brazen monuments to capitalism, a commercial failure as well. Their immolation gave them a significance they never possessed when they loomed, trivial and unwanted and unloved, over the New York skyline. It took a visionary like Downes to capture and expose their enormous, empty, desolate air. Which is another way of saying their hubris.

3. The Tenses of Landscape (1996)

John Constable, Hadliegy Castle (1829). Collection Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT

The book’s final essay touches on the sense of loss societies feel when they subdue the natural world in the name of progress. It draws on history, particularly the way the ancient Romans dominated and decimated landscapes by building straight roads, by clear-cutting forests to heat their immense bath houses, and by practicing intensive monoculture that exhausted fertile farmland and turned it into malarial swamps. Such short-sighted practices would accelerate during the Industrial Revolution, perhaps climaxing with the brutally efficient eyesore of America’s interstate highway system.

“But with each step forward in the name of progress,” Downes writes, “we seem to feel that there has been an attendant loss, and it often seems to be the role of landscape imagery to assuage this feeling. It is a role assumed by some of the great masters of European landscape painting.”

John Constable, for instance. Downes admires Constable not only for being sensitive to the social upheaval taking place in the English countryside in the early 19th century, but also for the “meteorological accuracy” of the skies in his landscapes. Downes quotes Constable as saying, “We see nothing truly till we understand it.” And he quotes Constable’s brother, a miller, as saying, “When I see a mill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those by other artists.” This sensitivity to the laws of nature and the workings of human history is something Constable, Chekhov, Downes and all realists hold sacred.

In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front (1990), oil on canvas, 16 x 120”. All Downes images courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery, NY

Here’s a typical Constable title: Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames – Morning After a Stormy Night. And here’s a typical Downes title: In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front (1990). It, too, is 10 feet long and just 16 inches tall. At first glance it’s a desolate panorama of distant power lines, a few wheezing oil rigs and a ditch full of reddish water on a vast platter of Texas scrub. But as with every Downes painting, the closer and longer you look at this blasted, post-industrial landscape, the more you see that it’s telling a story. The detail is astonishing, a reminder that Downes typically visits a site dozens of times over many months while making a picture. He parses the narrative of High Island Oil Field for us:

“Cows, horses and wading birds share this 1,200-acre field with

the pumps, and when strong winds blow in from the north after

the passage off a cold front, the sediments that are pumped up

with the oil and natural gas and which collect in the bottoms of

the ditches, are stirred up so the ditch water looks red. The

perspective down the centre of this painting is the raised

embankment of an old railroad bed. The cows like to congregate

and lie down to rest on this long-infertile ground because it

dries off quickly after a rain; and so they dung it up intensively too.

So, it is gradually beginning to regain fertility and support a sparse

cover of weeds… Here the tenses of a landscape imagery which

represents what is lost or threatened are reversed; we see

decaying industrialization being replaced or reclaimed by the

progress of nature. These weeds interest me more than ancient

redwoods; they are the vanguard of nature’s forces as she wages

her war back on us; perhaps I should say, here nature re-embraces

us, her prodigal sons and daughters. These weeds give the idea of

nature not as a state we’ve lost but as a process with a future.”

It’s an encouraging thought. The hubris Downes witnessed in Breughel’s epic Tower of Babel gave him fodder for his own narratives. But hubris is not invincible, its effects are not irreversible. Nature fights back. Even the most ravaged of landscapes has a future tense. And that may be the surprisingly upbeat story Rackstraw Downes has been telling us, with his paintbrush, all along.

By Bill Morris, Contributing Writer

Visit the Weatherspoon Museum site at: http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu

Look for current exhibitions at www.bettycunninghamgallery.com

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Left: Andy Warhol, Portrait of Doug Cramer (1985), acrylic and silksceen ink on linen. Collection Cincinnati Art Museum fine arts magazine

Cincinnati native, Douglas Cramer, standing in front of Warhol multiples, 1985. Photo: Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum

A television producer whose credits include The Brady Bunch, Mission: Impossible, The Love Boat, and a productive partnership with Aaron Spelling, this Cincinnati native is one of the nation’s foremost collectors of contemporary art. Cramer is routinely ranked by ARTnews as one of the top 200 collectors worldwide and his generosity has earned him the 2011 Cincinnati Art Award. Commemorating this moment, the current exhibition includes 32 pieces by Warhol, all portraits of Cramer made between 1984 and 1985.

Of the 32, eight of these portraits are Polaroid photographs of Cramer taken by Warhol to be used as the foundation for his trademark silkscreened works. As one might expect with an instant photo, these pictures are by no means subtle. Lacking delicacy, these high contrast images create a type of readymade, a model for Warhol to project and trace on to sheets of paper, because as he said “tracing is the best kind of drawing”.

The eight drawings of Cramer on view–descendants of the original photos- are for the most part, flat and lifeless. Though the didactic panel indicates that the works are a combination of traced projection and hand embellishment, the lack of variation and line sensitivity suggests otherwise. And two groups of three drawings are simply repetitions of the same two images. The hub of the exhibition, two sets of silkscreen and acrylic portraits fare only slightly better.

Andy Warhol with one of his many cameras (c.1980)

The first set features a black high contrast image of Cramer printed on four canvases, two with silver acrylic backgrounds and two with gold. Upon receipt of these Cramer was unsatisfied with the results and asked Warhol for something more colorful. Always eager to satisfy a customer, Warhol acquiesced. The results of Cramer’s request were four significantly more colorful, but marginally better paintings. Like all of the pieces in the show, these reworked paintings have nothing peculiar about them. Though the intense, saturated color –which immediately reads as being in vogue in the 1980’s- are the highlight of the show, these paintings present a rote repetition of the same image and are indistinguishable from Warhol’s other celebrity portraits of the era.

Much is made of Warhol’s allegedly ground breaking use of multiples, a comment that, in 1962, may have carried some weight. But by the time of these works -1985- the repetition comes off as soulless, as mechanical and cheap as anything made in China. Initially, Warhol discerned something unseemly about American life; a sinister undercurrent just below the surface of postwar prosperity. This keen observations gave his early works an edge and a vitality that all but disappeared by the late 1960s. By 1985 Warhol became what his seminal works exposed: an empty commodity seeking new markets.

By Alan Pocaro, Contributing Writer

Visit the Cincinnati Art Museum on line at: www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

Yigal Ozeri, Untitled, Garden of the Gods (2011), oil on paper. Image courtesy Mike Weiss Gallery

In his recent oil paintings, Yigal Ozeri explores personifications of youthful innocence, visualized as lovely young maidens-cum-goddesses. He situates them lingering in an iconic Eden, poised to confront the dangers and delights that womanhood encompasses. Ozeri captures the essence of young girls seen in contemplation or at play, pondering their existence and surroundings, unaware of their true feminine nature. The subjects are viewed as angels or deities of unsurpassed purity, still in their stage of unconscious budding growth. In the context of the narrative, the enigmatic vision of a beautiful girl asleep in the sun stirs a sense of curiosity and sadness at the predestined “awakening” to come. Picasso found his muse in the numerous engaging women he aligned himself with; they became the core of much of his art. Ozeri’s art is similarly infused with inspiration by the mingled enchantment and melancholy he experiences at the bittersweet fate of his sublime muses. fine arts magazine

Yigal Ozeri, Untitled, Garden of the Gods (2011), oil on paper. Image courtesy Mike Weiss Gallery

Ozeri masterfully transforms the Southwest landscape into a universal terrain of the mind, where red replaces green in a hot alien zone. The redness accentuates the tension generated as the girls sprawl on the rocks; they dwell in a perilous state, in which impending desire threatens their peace of mind and tranquility. Many of the scenes in this new series evoke the end of the day, a time for departures, or for the onset of new beginnings. The mysterious female fantasy figures are clothed in white dresses, reflecting the play of shadows and light that accentuate the transient character of the elusive scenes. In one picture, the delicate lacy dress relates to the fragile seedpods growing around the girl, implying the onset of fertility. As her strands of hair capture the same light as the thistles, she becomes one with the earth, as does the recumbent girl in another picture, who sleeps in the afternoon sun, embedded in a field of dry grasses. Her bare thigh is raised and exposed, hinting at unconscious yearnings she experiences as she dreams. Another figure whose head is wedged between two rocks appears to be pondering certain possibilities; light is dawning in her consciousness as she becomes aware of peril, of desire, of life on earth and its ramifications. A girl who sleeps in the sunshine seems to rest in the state of grace that defines the original Garden of Eden, before Eve sampled the fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge.”

Yigal Ozeri, Untitled, Garden of the Gods (2011), oil on paper. Image courtesy Mike Weiss Gallery

Ozeri creates groups of one, three or four figures, in symbolically potent arrangements. The number one represents creation, which encompasses totality and unity. We perceive the spiritual genesis of the original Mother Earth. In one scene, the high horizon makes a solitary red-haired girl seem united with the field where she stands immersed in a thicket of reddish bracken. Her white dress and complexion stand out as spiritual beacons that contradict her impulse to yield to her inner nature. For Pythagoreans, three portrays the notion of complete harmony, the fusion of unity and diversity. Heaven, Earth and humanity form another triumvirate. In a group of three girls, two sun worshipers sprawl with outstretched arms that express a sense of the illicit freedom to be had in the outdoors, while a third girl gazes furtively back to be sure she is unobserved. The number four denotes perfection; it relates to the seasons, the cardinal directions, and the four elements from Greco-Roman tradition. In one scene, the four figures picking grasses may be viewed as reapers, snatching grasses that are as ripe as they themselves are becoming. The universal underpinnings imbued in these images spark our realization of the meaning within the pictorial structures themselves.

Yigal Ozeri, 'Untitled, Garden of the Gods,' exhibit galleries. Image courtesy Mike Weiss Gallery

The large paintings on canvas are reminiscent of Peter Weir’s film “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” where schoolgirls disappear under mysterious circumstances, apparently into the rocks themselves. Perhaps the artist is hinting that these pure females will also disappear, to be replaced by adult women. The small-scale paintings link the pictures in stature to historical masterworks by presenting them museum-style in cases, distancing viewers and protecting the pictures from harm. Since many masterworks display religious themes, with figures of gods, saints and holy men and women, the message seems to be that these spiritually infused images are linked to a similar though more personal tradition as well.

Ozeri’s paintings offer sensitive metaphors for the passage of adolescent girls as they face the dangers and the possibilities that growth implies, eventually becoming mothers. Their ethereal, fleeting beauty temporarily transforms them into young goddesses. The artist adds his signature vision of figures, as they impact and merge with the terrain, to the explorations of those painters who have also engaged this iconic art theme. He seems especially inspired by the 19th century painter, Eduard Manet, who molded the subject of the female figure in the landscape with his individualistic style. Ozeri captures that indescribable time in life, when girls verge on becoming the future.

By Mary Hrbacek, Contributing Writer

Yigal Ozeri’s ‘Gardens of the Gods,’ at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 W. 24th Street, New York

On exhibition May 6 – June 11, 2011

Visit the gallery to see more works: www.mikeweissgallery.com

Behind the wall! Detail of Anne Ferrer's 'Billowing Beauty' (2010)

Anne Ferrer’s new series of colorful cloth sculptures, curated by Edward Rubin, is reminiscent of inflatable, shaped balloons that wink and bob in a kind of rhythmic modern dance. Up-down movements mingle with in-out ‘breathing’, as air slowly and randomly inflates and deflates each work. The seven pieces are composed as a tightly-clustered group. But each work is affixed with an electronic programmer that keeps its individual rhythmic movement activated. The pieces are anchored in a glass-fronted space that faces New York City’s Lexington Avenue and 47th Street, on a busy corner in the heart of mid-town. They impact their surroundings, breaking the boundary between the plate glass-walled gallery and the curious public on the street, who stop to wonder at the eye-catching array of indescribable shapes and forms, like candy confections just out of reach. Seductive and enigmatic, the works are ideal for attracting the attention of a busy crowd in motion. fine arts magazine

Street level- Anne Ferrer's Billowing Beauty (2010)

The installation is tightly composed to fit into the thirty-foot-long gallery, ballooning to fill the space from top to bottom. The works seem to jostle and sway as if in an effort to gain their own territory, as plant and sea life in the wild might—a natural dance in a struggle to survive. Beauty is rarely tame, but these works are playful rather than threatening. Their buoyant ‘attitude’ and indefinable meanings stir the imagination. They hint at circus tents, inflatable water toys, unusual animals, undersea life, gardens, French striped candy, or yummy pastries. By keeping forms fluid and definitions blurred, Ferrer encourages observers to supply their own personal interpretation. This quality of openness allows viewers to ‘play’ in the garden, as collaborators with the artist.

Ferrer is decidedly Catalan and French. At an early age, without television or much else to occupy her at home, she learned to sew, a skill that has become an intrinsic part of her life and her art. She uses a sewing machine as her brush. First she constructs patterns by cutting fabric in circular shapes, which she then pieces into larger structures that ultimately comprise the final sculptures. The stitches and seams define her forms in an organic manner; she sometimes abandons the pattern to create unexpected configurations. The artist also designs her own fashions in which the shapes from her works migrate to her personal attire.

French Sculptor, Anne Ferrer, in NYC for her recent opening at 'The Lab'. Photo: Edward Rubin

Warm colors, especially red and orange, exude a dominant aura. Known to signal danger or desire, here the colors are enveloping and welcoming. The sensuality and lushness of the satin and silk surfaces are especially alluring. They caress the eyes, hinting at satin quilts or bed-covers, whereas the rip-stop or raincoat fabric provides a more sporty or utilitarian subtext. The pieces in which white stripes alleviate the red resemble quasi-banners or flags. These items are often associated with personal, family or national identity, disclosing clues to the deeper meaning of the works. The stripes interact to make unusual patterns that stream and flicker through the seven works, uniting the entire compilation. Solid colors are interpenetrated with harmonious variations in hue, just as forms in paintings are often softened and varied. Painting plays a large role in this work; color is not often associated with sculpture as a genre. Ferrer’s pieces are the antithesis of traditional sculpture; they are light and airy, not heavy or massive. The entire show can be transported in one suitcase! This is an exceptionally ‘green’ or environmentally friendly approach to art-making.

In her semi-intuitive process, Ferrer makes patterns, but also deviates from them to construct improvised shapes that evoke unexpected emotions. The works assume a life of their own; their size alone removes them from the orbit of easy apprehension, or clear definitions. Viewers must grapple with mystery and uncertainty as they ask themselves what exactly they are seeing. Like a parade, the installation is lively, active and lush. The tone is determinedly optimistic. These soft sculptures succeed in engaging the senses and the imagination. They are not meant to be pondered but to be enjoyed, and would be huggable if they were not so airy and light. The meaning of the installation is found in its interrelationships, not in individual works. Animals, gardens, candies, tents, kites, inflatable water toys, flags and balloons all have a portion of the multi-meaningful ménage. The organic shapes, warm harmonious hues, and rhythmic organization interact, infused with vivid joyous fun. Los Angeles composer Carol Worthey’s delicate sensitive music accompanies the display; it can be heard as one views the installation from the street.

By Mary Hrbacek, Contributing Writer

At, The LAB [for installation+ performance art], Roger Smith Hotel, New York City, May 13 – June 3, 2011

www.thelabgallery.com

AK Airways, Cuddlefish (2009), vinyl, lights

Jasper Johns said, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.” He encourages each artist to embrace the act of creating something that enthralls, the moment it is perceived. Enhance the work by pushing its boundaries to a new level, he seems to be saying. Expand awareness by defining where exactly that sphere lies. The art on display at Outsight Inn in Rupert Ravens Contemporary embraces Johns’ concept, flexing our preconceived assumptions. In this high-tech world, there are many ways we can rely on technology to take us to these stratospheric heights; but art, effectively executed, can achieve similar goals, enhancing our comprehension of the world around us. fine arts magazine

Jared Whitham, fore: 9/11 Keyboard Relic (2010), mixed media; back: Florida House w/ Garage Sale (2010), mixed media

Upon entering, the work of Jared Whitham and Stefanie Nagorka offers a reflection on Americana. Whitham has constructed a full-scale Florida home with pink shingles and white picket fence. Aptly titled Garage Sale, complete with carport, housing this on-going investigation he has carried on for years. The plethora of items available for sale sparks a conversation on modern society and the objects it produces. Nagorka’s My America, 49 porcelain representations of the American states, communicates eloquently. It is the visual reminder of our terrestrial permanence and our governments self imposed legal boundaries. The face of her work carries the four-color palette of mapmakers, yet the back is painted black, representing the underbelly or dark side of this country.

Stefanie Nagorka, My America (2010), porcelain, acrylic, hay

The work of Matt Stone comprises various sculptures of cardboard, wood, wax, burnt plastic, feathers and colored foam. Taking up residence in a corner of the second floor, Stone invites you into a world of his own making. He favors banal objects, but the transformation is a sight to behold, speeding past your retina, straight to your neocortex. You are no longer in a former furniture store in downtown Newark. You are surrounded instead by shapes, colors, textures and forms which take hold (birds, trees, prehistoric predators, etc). Look! Jutting drawers and tilted glass, tree rings, is that…? The artist provokes open-ended questions, swirling emotions—a new realization permeates—only to be undone. A momentary reprieve comes with a fresh perspective. Attention to detail is paramount to Johns’ “do something” idea, experimentation being an essential factor in the equation. Certain components are vital to the narrative for Stone—the protagonist, antagonist and supporting roles—all coalescing through the dynamic of his work.

Matthew Stone, Body Electric (2009), mixed media

Conversely, the iPad creations of Olu Oguibe do not espouse the same sentiment. These canvases do not engross the viewer as effectively. They appear not to disengage from the here-and-now. A diverse palette of pulsating brushstrokes conceived on an iPad, printed on canvas— digital-to-physical—offers an intriguing glimpse, more than a fully-realized, artistic vision. The artist takes several steps to achieve a distinctive perspective; these pieces are unique more for their printing ingenuity than their subject matter. In doing so, he appears to miss the mark with his exhibit. It is a familiar scene—the viewer stands and admires rather than becoming engaged. The more he attempts to move against the grain, the closer he comes to common elaboration.

Olu Oguibe, Untitled VI (2010), Apple Ipad, archival pigment on canvas, uv coating

What if you take a system of energetic brush strokes—constricting the palette—resulting in a neo-algorithm, a new language? To risk the creation of a cohesive narrative, relying on paint alone, where presentation and context are crucial to understanding, may not always yield an effective result. In a series of paintings, John Mendelsohn successfully achieves this result. Tact, when applying pigment—direction and arrangement—is of utmost importance; for if the effects don’t cohere, there is no moment of release, no flash of sublimity. Mendhelson’s work distinguishes itself by unifying these elements. The colors capture what the lines do not, and vice-versa. His work may be random movements of brush and body; they are certainly not arbitrary in relation to one another. The works functional well separately—and as a unified whole—the eye finding new reasons to return to the work, time and again, in pursuit of his procession of color.

Christopher Tanner, Pink Narcissus/Cake Walk (2007), mixed media

Having been inundated with detail to this point in the exhibit, Christopher Tanner’s work offers little reprieve. His decadent sculptures assault your senses. Gaudy? Perhaps. However, those quick to dismiss do so at their own peril. Tanner’s work is pure burlesque, pomp and circumstance shot from a cannon. Not lacking in innuendo, his work is a fitting alternative to bland nudity. It is an amalgam of elements that asks for your attention and indulgence. Of the work discussed thus far, his work delves deepest into Jasper Johns’ directive. Here, careful examination pays off, with each and every jewel, sequin, and fabric swatch, every minute element, vital to his Gestalt. Two pieces laid out on black fabric succeed in transporting the viewer to a different level of perception. Comprised of leather and jewel-bedecked, the work offers a surprising re-interpretation of the expected. They transmogrify into representations of elegant women, lying on their sides, hair flowing, curves seducing—temptresses with nary a human detail. Where others incorporate simplicity, Tanner engages in decadence and over-saturation, not limited by scale. If Tanner had lived in the 17th century and worked as court artiste for the Sun King, one could imagine that Versailles would have looked like this.

Rich Wislocky, Lord Evil Falcon & Tribal Perch (2010), mirrors & mixed media

AK Airways’, Cuddlefish, still laden with playa dust from the Nevada desert soars above, below and beyond your peripheral vision. Comprised of five gargantuan, inflatable, glowing, orange ‘worms’, it raises the stakes of the other works on display. Don’t paint the monster, MAKE IT. Don’t just sketch a flower, construct one. Markus Baenziger does so through Forever Never, a metal base festooned with dozens of delicate resin leaves. There is also Turn Around, faux-weeds affixed to a concrete moored fence, appearing to be ripped from the street and brought to the Outsight Inn gallery wall.

Markus Baenziger, Forever Never (2005), metal, resin, wood

Of the many artistic works on display at Outsight Inn, two artists are exemplars to understanding what Johns meant by saying “do something else to it.” Rich Wislocky and Ryan C. Doyle succeed by expanding beyond the limits of gravity-bound thinking, taking us to the otherworldliness of their fertile imaginations. Wislocky’s work occupies an entire corner of the gallery—but the space does not simply serve as a repository of ideas. It is a dream world. Turn a corner to discover an entirely surreal atmosphere of mirrors, lights, masks, found objects, totems and images. His is an invitation to another planet—it’s a journey far away, seen through the eyes of his masks, evoking Stravinsky’s early 20th century modern ballets, such as The Firebird. Do not fear! The only thing you are overdosing on is intimate panoply of resourceful and brilliant imagination. Ideas become reflected realities, as a maze of mirrors and spotlights scatter light in every direction. Repetitious imagery (Gandhi, Jesus, Manhattan, etc.) coexists with found-objects; all conceived and presented as demented orgies of plastic toys.

Ryan C. Doyle creates another distinct environment. On the gallery’s third floor, you are greeted by an illustrated skull, encircled by a heart with the words “Idle hand is the devils play tool.” His hands are surely not idle; Doyle’s ride-on installations are certainly devilish toys. Flames spit from the Regurgitator as its patron sits helplessly, waiting to be whipped into a mind-numbing vortex of mechanically-inspired vertigo. Inside, a collaborative mural between Doyle and Mikey 907, Detroit: Half-Dead and Dynamite, provides a backdrop to a dwelling of cracked floors, chipped paint, graffiti throw-ups, empty beer cans and another imposing ride-able sculpture, Hella-Copter.

Ryan Doyle, fore: Hella-Copter (2009); Mikey 907, back: Detroit, Half-Dead and Dynamite (2010), florescent spray paint

As previously stated, the success of adhering to Johns’ “do something” revelation is founded in a creators’ ability to wholly remove the viewer from reality. Stability is unwelcome, no foundation, no shelter—the exhibit demands that you must confront this work and digest it. Never boring, these artists work outside the bounds of the expected, while pushing the limits of creative expression. Whether successful or not, in this writer’s eyes, each artist disengages from the predictable to stride assertively, taking that compelling step into the arena of contemporary art…asking, What’s next?!

By Lawrence Ciarallo, Guest Contributor

Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark, NJ.

www.rupertravens.net

Mary Hrbacek, Entwined (2007), 40x44"

“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men… trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings – many of them not so much.” -John Muir, Scribner’s Monthly, November, 1878. 

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” -Henry David Thoreau  

For the past decade or so, perhaps triggered by the tripling of anxiety-producing catastrophes around the world, trees of all kinds, sometimes even small forests, both realistic and obviously faux, have been making their appearance in the work of sculptors, painters, and video and installation artists. It seems more and more artists, in what appears to be an increasing back-to-nature ‘trendette’, are using trees in their work as a metaphor for examining the nature of mankind, as well as the fate of the world. fine arts magazine 

Woman Astride (2008) 42x48"

 Working in this naturalist mode is artist Mary Hrbacek whose anthropomorphic tree portraits are currently on exhibit at the Creon Gallery in New York City through April 30. Curated by Richard Pasquarelli, Hrbacek’s trees, practicing their magic under the title Entwined, are not only transcendent but speak directly to the heart, reminding us, a bit surreptitiously at that, that we are all walking trees. Our spines are trunks, our legs and arms are branches, and sooner or later, with twisted limbs and weathered bones, we too shall be planted.  

The Creon Gallery, founded in 2009 by Norm Hinsey is the perfect venue, spatially speaking, in which to closely contemplate the philosophical approach of Hrbacek’s boldly rendered paintings. In two smallish, white-walled rooms, and a backyard garden to exhibit work outdoors, the tiny gallery, housed, one could almost say, quietly hidden, in the back of a residential apartment complex, visitors are all but guaranteed, a pleasuring, one-on-one intimacy with the art.  

Light Search (2010), 42x46"

Though Entwined covers a scant 4 years, Hrbacek, has been traveling the world taking photographs, and making charcoal drawings and painting of trees that have shed their leaves and exposed their so-called bones, in Asia and Europe, as well as Brooklyn, and New York’s Central Park, for over ten years. Her repertoire also includes assemblages which use natural materials such as sticks, stones, pinecones and leaves, as well as drawings from live models, traces of which can be divined in the artist’s sculptural brushwork — finely executed lines that give form to her tree portraits.  

Last Dance (2007), 40x44"

In Entwined (2007), above, the tree’s two main branches, each one circling the other like boxers looking for an in, are vividly framed by a blue sun-drenched sky. Thinking of human relations, Hrbacek, explaining her ideas behind each work on a listed works sheet given out at the gallery, writes “They (the branches) are interdependent; just as so many other living things are connected and dependent on each other.” In Woman Astride (2008), a feminine looking figure, with arms akimbo, seems to be in the throes of ecstasy. Here the painter, perhaps waxing autobiographical, sees a woman expressing “a feeling of freedom, combined with a sense of risk-taking. There is an evocation of euphoria to the female-like form as it achieves a level of freedom and independence, while remaining anchored to its natural habitation.”  

In Light Search (2010),  under a pale blue sky that could be morning or dusk – two branches resembling hands, reach for the sky. They could be praying, shouting Halleluiah, or chucking it all by throwing their hands up in surrender, or like the artist suggests “searching for answers” — anything to lessen the “anxiety and the tension that arises from life itself.” In Last Dance (2007) Hrbacek captures two trees in the backwoods of Vermont. With one tree’s swaying branches encircling the other, the trees seem to be enacting a ritual dance. 

In Hanging Suspended (2008), left, a five hundred year old Sycamore that the painter discovered in Viareggio, Italy, we see what appears to be the torso of a male with his thighs still attached dangling upside down like a tortured body from one of Jake and Dinos Chapman installations. Like all of Hrbacek’s trees, this so-called torso, separated from its leafy origin, marks it especially, as the artist writes, “as a symbol of isolation in a topsy-turvey world.” Clearly all of Hrbacek’s eleven trees on view face the same trials and tribulations – civilization gone amuck – as we all are. No doubt, this is one of the messages that the artist wants us to walk away with.  

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer  

 CREON Gallery 238 E 24 St, NY, NY 10010  646.265.5508 www.creongallery.com

Rondo, detail (2010). Wool, cotton and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina

 While the title of Santa Fe-based artist Joyce Melander-Dayton’s current outing at the June Kelly Gallery in New York City reads Extravagant Constructions—an apt title, especially when you are standing up close, studying the artist’s intricately bejeweled craftsmanship and her use of materials and patterning (think Faberge Egg or the Gobelin Tapestries )—it could just as easily have been labeled, depending on where you stand in relation to her work, where your brain is at the moment, and how well you know the artist’s past history, Musical Meditations, Celestial Compositions, or How I Keep My Life Together. For the exhibition is all of this and more—the ‘more’ being, quietly beautiful in the extreme, and very much alive. fine arts magazine 

Con Brio (2010), Cherry beeswing veneer, silk, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

Slow and steady, followed by a small, but nonetheless, near cataclysmic change in the direction of her work, seems to be Melander-Dayton’s modus operandi. At her three 2007 exhibitions at Aaron Payne Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Gallery Shoal Creek, in Austin and the June Kelly Gallery, the artist, primarily known for her figurative work, fully embraced the abstract, presenting her collaged, fabric and fiber-based ornamental elements on linen. At last year’s mid-career retrospective at the Rymer Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, it was the artist’s free- standing abstract sculptures that made an unexpected appearance. This past summer, in yet another ‘new works’ exhibition at Aaron Payne, her home town gallery, it was Melander-Dayton’s three- dimensional wall hangings, composed of exotic wood veneers, wool, silk fabrics, and glass beads, that took us by surprise. 

Extravagant Constructions, yet another of the artist’s leaps into uncharted territory, is Melander-Dayton’s most elegantly curated , spiritually-resonant showing to date. It is hard to imagine – nonetheless, this is what transpires – that each of the eight works on view tackles so many ideas with such otherworldly elegance. The only possible explanation, other than acknowledging the visionary aspects of New Mexico’s landscape that bleed into your very bones, and the artist’s innate passion for music, is that Melander-Dayton has mastered the art of channeling, heart, soul, and a whole lot of psychic energy, into each work that she gives birth to. What better place to store your valuables. 

Rondo (2010). Wool, cotton and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

In Rondo (2010), composed of 40 modules varying in size and stretching nearly 9 feet across, Melander-Dayton recreates a mountain stream whose crystal -clear running water covers a bed of shimmering stones composed of intensely-colored glass beads and lengths of wool, woven into blue modules, arranged in a horizontal bubble-like flow, transforming Rondo into the musical equivalent of a babbling brook. The work, situated in a corner of the gallery where two walls meet—an out-of-the-ordinary placement deliberately designed by the artist to split our viewing experience in half—forces our eyes to jump from one wall to the other, effectively evoking the sense of swift, running water. 

Allegro Non Troppo, detail (2008), Silk, nylon, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina

A simpler work, in size and number of units, is Archipelago (2010). In eight triangular- shaped, sangria bubinga burl veneer gatorboard modules, decorated with swatches of silk fabric and strings of wool and beads, the artist revisits Okinawa, a chain of islands off the Japanese coast, where she lived for two years as a youth. In Ryukyu Rain (2010), one of exhibition’s smaller, statelier works—Ryukyu also part of an island chain in the Western Pacific—Melander-Dayton, decorates four green willow veneer modules, the very largest an oval, with her customary silk fabrics, beads, and strands of wool. The overriding color of this work is a dry-looking tan, and actually conjures up the feel of the island’s weather—the air that we feel is hot and humid. 

Music, (her daily piano playing in particular), in addition to informing her work—like surgeons known to have taken up knitting—keeps the artist’s fingers nimble for weaving, cutting, sewing, embroidering, and working a jigsaw to cut and shape various veneers incorporated into her work. Many of Melander-Dayton’s creations bear titles of musical movements and those movements, themselves—lively, spirited, repeat, and gliding—play a part in the artist’s selection and placement of materials, not only within each module, but in the ultimate layout of the finished work. In Glissando (2010), described in musical terms as ‘a rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones in a scale-like passage’, the artist emulates the slide, forcing our eyes to do the same, in an eight part, horizontally laid- out, walnut burl veneer, wool and glass- beaded work. In Con Brio, another musically- inspired work, Melander-Dayton places twelve circular modules in a vertical line. , The artist imbues each segment—playfully dancing up the wall—with the joyous spirit that ‘Con Brio’ implies. 

Allegro Non Troppo, (2008), Silk, nylon, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

Allegro Non Troppo (2008), by virtue of its size, startling mixture of color, diversity of patterning, and sparkling glitter, and Theme and Variations (2010), which seems to be signaling yet another new direction for the artist, are the exhibition’s showstoppers. At $25,000 each, they also command the most money. Allegro Non Troppo, ‘fast but not too fast’ in music, has all the excitement, exuberance and fizz of a champagne toast at a New Year’s Eve party. Nearly two feet high, and ten feet in length, the celebratory work sports 42 variously shaped eye-popping, red, black and white circles in over a dozen different designs. Some are circles within circles that cling to each other. Others stand alone, each decorated in a different manner, with wool, beads, cotton and Japanese silk fabrics that look like small paintings. The overall effect, as eye-catching as the aurora borealis, is that of fireworks lighting up the sky. 

Theme and Variations (2010) is a whole different kettle of fish. (Detail, right, silk, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina)  While the other works on view are thin enough to underscore the modules’ flatness, each of the nine, vertically- hung, oval- shaped wall sculptures in Theme and Variations, with depths ranging from 2 to 10 inches, jump right off the wall, leading to a totally different viewing experience. The almost, but not quite, 2-dimensional components of Melander-Dayton’s other works which allow one to view many components as a whole, are ditched in this multi-faceted ensemble. Here, due to a variance of depth, as well as unique design of each sculpture—at certain angles they resemble cakes, at others, sewing kits or small hat boxes—the eye has no one flat surface on which to rest or come to a conclusion. As our eyes are forced to scan each work, up, down, and sideways, our brain, also, must observe, one by one, what it is that we are looking at. It is an exciting situation to be in, as well as a puzzle to be solved. 

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer 

Joyce Melander Dayton: Extravagant Constructions 

June Kelly Gallery 

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel (212) 226-1600 

Through March 29, 2011