Reunited

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

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Published: Apr 4, 2007

It was love at first sight.

The tall, blue-shadowed, crisply modeled painting was Mother and Son. The place was the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the time, my first visit to PAFA.

I'd never heard the artist's name, Daniel Garber, but I'd never forget the domestic interior breathing casual affluence and opening onto a lush summery landscape. Especially, I would remember almost as acquaintances the two figures: the older woman, thoughtful and competent in sensible shoes, contemplating a chess move observed by a benign but slightly aloof young man, her son and opponent in this friendly game.

At around 80 by 70 inches, Garber's 1933 painting speaks subtly of family and social class and powerfully of the evanescent beauty of a moment in time. It is so coolly observed (in the manner of Eakins, the painter Garber admired above all others) that trite sentimentality is defused.

Garber donated this largest figural work of his career to PAFA; but it is currently on view at the Michener Museum as part of the large double venue Garber retrospective of painting, prints, drawings and memorabilia jointly organized by the two institutions.

Garber said Mother and Son is about the "love of my own place and those two people." Decades of physical aging and the unchanging hairstyle of his wife Mary, the "Mother" in the painting, are almost uncannily documented, as is the varied landscape of New Hope.

Lately the New Hope painters — Garber was tops — are regaining the luster they had three quarters of a century ago. Even in his heyday, Garber was called "decorative." His slightly orientalized compositions obviously relate to artists like Whistler, Sargent and even Maxfield Parrish. Garber shrewdly deploys the affects of light: back lighting flowing through gauzy clothing and silhouetting foregrounded trees; July light transforming the cool, angled shadows of a grapevine into abstract elegance, and golden winter light dissolving rough quarry stone into molten ambers.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Daniel Garber: Romantic Realist

Through April 8, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St.215-972-7600, and James A. Michener Art Museum, Through May 6, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, 215-340-9800

 

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