Through the Looking Glass

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

Elizabeth Osborne and Sidney Goodman were almost envelope-busting painters for an earlier generation; now they are iconic. Both made names for themselves during the 1960s, and for many years both have taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation's oldest art school.

For some, including some alumni, PAFA — with its emphasis on drawing and painting — represents everything old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud. Those values, people say, are one reason Philadelphia is not taken seriously as an art city. I find this view myopic and self-defeating; Philadelphia has a diverse, burgeoning, nonpainting art community. And even if the practice of painting continues to attenuate, work like Osborne's and Goodman's will not become irrelevant.

Of course, the two aren't alike. Goodman is all about the human figure. One of the ultra-exclusive group of Philadelphia artists to receive a solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1996) while alive, Goodman uses the figure metaphorically as an expressive device. I have not always been a fan of his large figure compositions; they can seem too dense with exhausting meaning, turgid and dark. Nevertheless, there's no denying that Goodman knows what he's doing. You can see several of his paintings in a current show at Seraphin Gallery, but the PAFA show consists exclusively of drawings, his forte.

Goodman's attack is comparatively heavy-handed even at his most sensitive, as when he's drawing his dying mother in a halo of light or his children. His touch, however, is staggeringly deft, like Muhammad Ali. Pain and violence, especially implicit in sex and the mundane events of daily life, pervade these images and imprint on the mind.

Goodman's obsession with violence has been compared to Francisco Goya's: Both know the piercing bitterness of life and how to tell about it in black and white; both are cognizant of the violence inherent in the ordinary as well as literal torture and all-out conflict. Goodman's work also resonates with Leon Golub's compositionally daring representations of violence and with another socially motivated artist, Diego Rivera.

Initially, I questioned the choice of the eponymous image for this show, the self-portrait Man in the Mirror (pictured, p. 22). It is hardly the most striking drawing Goodman has made: a straightforward representation of a man shaving. But on consideration it refracts like the two mirrors Goodman must have used to make it. His shaving cream-coated jaw awakens memories of our lives serially reflected in steamy, soap-smelling bathrooms. The hand in the picture makes the vague half-gesture of a man approaching his jaw with a razor in the other (invisible) hand. Goodman's gaze is inward, without vanity, unself-conscious — a man alone with himself and a razor. Or is it a stick of charcoal? In this corner of the universe of sentience, no one surpasses Sidney Goodman.

Just to stand in a gallery surrounded by Elizabeth Osborne's painting is glorious. The PAFA retrospective charts Osborne's changing approaches over time and, consequently, reveals her continuing commitment to color and refined linear arrangements. The attention to delicate contours reminds me of Botticelli.

From the early decades two works stand out. The Visit II (1968) depicts two contemporary women in a setting containing two small images of women, including an apposite Paul Gauguin reproduction. Portrait of Tony Greenwood (1978) is fascinating as a feminist commentary (denied as intentional by Osborne) skewering the sour-faced sculptor surrounded by casts of fragmented female statuary.

Osborne inserted assemblage elements in a few works and finally abandoned the figure. She's now best-known for still life. The purple Lily Pond I (Lotus) (1998), with its light and dark reversals, is hardly groundbreaking but exceptionally pleasing. Recent minimal landscape-y compositions are less piquant, but the drippy silhouettes of vessels in Requiem (for CW) (2001) delight. Osborne shows us how marvelous it is simply to see.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light Through Sept. 20, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St., 215-972-7600, pafa.org

Sidney Goodman: Strange Clarity Through July 28, Seraphin Gallery, 1108 Pine St., 215-923-7000, seraphingallery.com