|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: Learning to Fly Boxed In First Friday Focus East Meets Midwest Poe's Own Twilight Zone |
|
|
|
|
 |
|||||||||
June 6-12, 2002
art
 Larry Rivers, Drugstore (1959), 15 1/4 inches by 13 inches, oil on board. |
|
If it’s not quite a match made in heaven, “Larry and Grace” (that’s Larry Rivers and Grace Hartigan, to you) are a divine duo. The pairing is a kind of blind date fixed up by Tony Seraphin, owner of Seraphin Gallery. Although she’s an artistic generation older than he is, Hartigan and Rivers have much in common: New York, the 20th century, color and an immersion in the atmosphere of abstract expressionism, though Rivers is most often associated with pop art.
The show includes work from the '50s through the 1990s, but it's a smallish selection. The works by Rivers, mostly multiples and sketches, are not as substantial as those by Hartigan. Nevertheless, though you can't follow every twist and turn of each artist's evolution, you get a sense of how they've changed.
Rivers was the mid-century American who could draw. More openly political than most pop art, his characteristic style played patterns and details off half-realized contours. It explored Americana in a pungent mix of irony and corrupt nostalgia.
That jagged edge is missing from Rivers' recent work. He still choreographs materials with the smooth panache of Fred Astaire and you can't help responding to the lush color and fluid handling of forms.
Astaire is depicted with unambiguous nostalgia in two recent pieces. Fred & Ginger (1999) is an editioned silk-screen mounted on cut-out layers of foamboard. The layers are printed with Rivers' typical calligraphic flourishes, stacked and then the edges are painted to match the adjacent flat image, making a low relief. The dance is the Carioca, a novelty number, in which partners remain forehead to forehead throughout. Rivers makes it look a bit adversarial.
In Make Believe Ballroom, executed in grays and black, the male dancer really looks like Fred and the transitions between layers of foamboard are modulated with something like modeling paste. Fred has a low-relief boutonniere.
Probably the best use of the foamboard technique in the show is Matisse Opera (1992). Done in an edition of only two, it depicts an artist who could be Matisse drawing a model reflected in a mirror. Spatially it's complex and jazzy. Conceptually, it suggests Rivers himself as an established maestro, improvising for pleasure and profit rather than wrestling with difficult art issues.
A drawing, Salute (1997), shows how Rivers can take Norman Rockwell schlock and spin the non-schlock out like butter. Rockwell's effortless illustration must have been an influence on the young Rivers considering the two artists' similar feeling for snappy compositions and their contrasting political sensibilities. The earlier Diana's Polish Vocabulary Lesson (1972), an unpretentious work which employs collage and text, more fully evokes mid-century Rivers as well as Duchamp and cubists.
Oddly, my most intense memory of Grace Hartigan's painting comes from putting together a jigsaw puzzle of one of her works. Not very highbrow art education, but an effective immersion in the way she uses color, brush strokes and shapes to pull a painting together -- especially in spatial terms. What I respect about Hartigan is the way she works the paint. The paintings are records of activity, both physical and mental.
A true AbEx painting from 1950, The Cue is a big de Kooning-ish slather of black, brown, blue and white. Painters at that time strove to deny the primacy of a central image, to privilege "all-over" painting. If you don't repeat yourself and make patterns, this is harder than you might imagine. Hartigan jumps in with gusto. I can't say I really love The Cue, but I appreciate it. A vertical work, Portrait W, probably the best painting in the show, locks together black, white, blue, sienna and yellow in a tight yet fluid mix of pure painting.
The recent figurative painting Mott Street (1989) is divided vertically: a red left half with spatters of yellow, green and white on the right. Superimposed on this atmospheric ground, drippy outlines of figures have a kinetic wispy quality. Not an athletic contest with paint and brush strokes, Mott Street is less calculated and more joyful than earlier pieces like Portrait W. Even more directly, the illustrational Grazie Rosetti (1995) superimposes outlined figures onto a colored ground.
Hartigan's 1969 Anatomy of Calvert suggests the transition between early and later works. Big muscular brush strokes define very recognizable representations of bones: ribs, a pelvis, vertebrae, teeth. Restricting her palette to gray-green, gray, black and white, Hartigan maintains a funereal or, maybe, scientific atmosphere for this dissection.
One observation that may be suggested by this half-century bouquet of two top-ranking artists is that pioneers tend to relax as they grow older, especially if they are revered and bankable. They do what they do best and enjoy it. It may not be their most formidable work, but why shouldn't we enjoy it, too?
