Just Looking: New England Art from YankeeMagazine.com

Rockstone and Bootheel @ Real Art Ways

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, has organized a multimedia celebration of contemporary West Indian culture that includes videos, films, live music, readings, and a wide ranging art exhibition. Entitled Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art, the exhibition (through March 14) was curated by Real Art Ways director of visual arts Kristina Newman-Scott and arts consultant Yona Backer, both natives of Jamaica. Together they have assembled a lively representative selection of edgy art from the English-speaking islands of the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Rockstone and Bootheel is a colloquial expression meaning "to take a journey" and takes its title from a song by Jamaican musician Leebert "Gibby" Morrison. Indeed, West Indian dance hall music, reggae, and Carnival customs infuse the exhibition, which features 39 artists in all manner of media. Hartford reportedly is home to the third largest West Indian community in the U.S. (after New York and Miami), so Rockstone and Bootheel should have great resonance there.

What you will not see in Rockstone and Bootheel are any of the lovely Homeresque Caribbean landscapes so popular with tourists. No breezy watercolors of azure seas, salmon beaches, and swaying palm trees. Rockstone and Bootheel is not export art, it's art to the bone, the authentic expression of the native culture of the Anglophone islands, former British colonies still struggling with issues of colonialism and identity.

About the closest thing to a conventional painting you will find in the exhibition is an oil on canvas by Phillip Thomas, a young Jamaican artist now working in New York. Entitled "The N Train," the painting is a New York subway scene populated by a passing parade of people of Afrikan descent in colorful, historical costumes, an image of diaspora.

Many of the works in Rockstone and Bootheel are visual journeys of self-discovery as well as self-expression. Jamaican-born Ebony G. Patterson, for example, creates mixed media images that explore and embody issues of skin lightening, gangsta stereotypes of masculinity, and the cosmetic elements of homosexuality and Catholicism. Lawrence Graham-Brown, an openly gay Jamaican artist, assembles sculptures that are emblematic of history and liberation, such as "Ras Pan Afro Homo Sapiens," a torso mannequin wearing a military tunic covered with currency and political buttons.

A far more subtle evocation of cultural identity, and to me the signature work of the exhibition is a digital print from the "Powder Box (Schoolgirl Series" by Marlon Griffith of Trinidad. "West Indian working class women are known to apply baby powder to their bodies as a symbol of cleanliness," explains the Real Art Ways press release. Griffith creates stencils, some geometric shapes, others of fashion logos, that he uses to apply baby powder to the skin of school girls, and then he photographs them. The idea, the act, and the image become one, an ambiguous expression that is ultimately an indictment of how a dominant culture impresses itself on the self-image of the oppressed.

[Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford CT. 860-232-1006.]

25 Cent Children's Classics

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

What is the best-selling children's book of all-time? My first guess would have been The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. My second guess would have been The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. But in fact, the best-selling children's book of all time is The Poky Little Puppy written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustav Tenggren. Apparently, while the literary world was busy elsewhere, The Poky Little Puppy has sold some 15 million copies since it was first published in 1942. The timeless simplicity, charm, sincerity, and character building merits of this unprepossessing little picture book about a curious puppy who likes to dig holes under the fence and go exploring has made it a mass market classic.

The Poky Little Puppy was one of the first 12 titles published by Golden Books, the collaboration between Western Publishing in Madison, Wisconsin and Simon & Schuster that pioneered the mass market approach to children's literature. Little Golden Books are as much a part of the American experience as the Golden Arches, the McDonald's of kiddie lit. Golden Books celebrated its 65th anniversary in 2007 with two billion books sold and a book and exhibition entitled Golden Legacy. Currently (November 24 through February 28), Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books is being featured at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts. The museum was founded in 2002 by Mr. Carle, the author-illustrator of #20 on the all-time list, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a contemporary classic though not itself a Golden Book.

Golden Legacy includes original artwork from the Golden Book series, and astonishing four titles of which are among the top ten best-selling children?s books - The Poky Little Puppy, Tootle (1945) by Gertrude Crampton, Saggy Baggy Elephant (1947) by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, and Scuffy the Tugboat (1955) by Gertrude Crampton. Pat the Bunny (1940), the interactive board book by Dorothy Kunhardt, is also in the top ten and also published by Golden Press, but it predated the Golden Book series by two years.

Golden Books were not only a marketing innovation but also a literacy campaign, putting affordable 25 cent children's books in the hands of American families during World War II. Not great literature perhaps, but Golden Books were cheap and plentiful and available at most local supermarkets.

Personally, I grew up with the absurd pulp comic tales of Uncle Wiggily, a genre as looked down upon by librarians and literati as Golden Books. I raised my own three girls on the naturalism of Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine and Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius and Island Boy as well as the ironic mystifications of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express. I don't think there's a single Golden Book in our house.

That said, I fear I may have missed the homelier virtues of the popular little cardboard Golden Books with their signature golden spines. Many of the Golden Books were written by Simon & Schuster staff members, though Golden Books' goldmine, The Poky Little Puppy, was written by Janette Sebring Lowrey, a reclusive Texan who mostly wrote young adult novels. Ms Lowrey was reportedly paid a flat fee of $75 for her creative efforts.

But as visitors to the Carle Museum will see, the Golden Book series also helped launch such children's book giants as author Margaret Wise Brown and illustrators Gustav Tenggren, Garth Williams, and Richard Scarry. Ultimately, I have come to believe it doesn't matter what you read as long as you read.

This exhibition was organized by the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, Abilene, TX.

[Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Rd., Amherst MA, 413-658-1100.]

Everything Old Is New Again

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Art and technology tend to have a love-hate relationship. Some artists embrace the latest technologies as new tools with which to create. Other artists react against new technologies, embracing instead traditional even antique mediums. Examples of both impulses can currently be seen in a pair of remote and unrelated exhibitions that nonetheless beg to be considered together.

Sonia Landy Sheridan: Art's Passionate Pilgrim at Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH (through January 3) is an exhibition of work by an artist who explored the creative possibilities of emerging imaging technologies, including the Xerox photocopier and 3M Thermo-Fax copier.

Sonia Landy Sheridan began her experiments with photocopiers as a function of generating posters and broadsides for antiwar protests in the 1960s, then from 1970 to 1980 she ran the Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2002, Sheridan, a Hanover resident, donated 600 of her works created between 1949 and 2002 to the Hood Museum.

Sheridan's pioneering aesthetic research into the implications of the communications revolution for art led her to work in at least 31 different imaging technologies from reprography to computer animation and digital imaging. Working at the nexus of science, technology, and art, she produced a body of work that is essentially about visualizing change over time.

Going Forward, Looking Back - Practicing Historic Photographic Processes in the 21st Century at the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland, Me (November 17 to January 31) features 150 photographs by 24 contemporary photographers who, eschewing the new, employ vintage photographic technologies in pursuit of their art. They are not, however, conservative throwbacks, but rather part of a pervasive trend in contemporary photography, artists employing 19th century means to 21st century ends.

Curated by Stephen Halpert, Going Forward - Looking Back features tintypes by Keliy Anderson-Staley, ziatypes by Jon Bakos, cyanotypes by Laura Blacklow, large color pinhole photographs by Robert Calafiore, collodian prints by Bev Conway, palladium prints by Tillman Crane, pinholes by Walter Crump, photos in a variety of mediums by Dan Estabrook, argyrotypes by Jesseca Ferguson, ambrotypes by Mary Frey, tintypes by Nate Gibbons, photogravure by Jon Goodman, cynotypes by Brenton Hamilton, palladiums by Sean Harris, gum bichromate prints by Cig Harvey, salt prints by Christopher James, kallitypes by Niles Lund, cyanotypes by Peter Madden, ambrotypes by David Puntel, albumen prints by Gary Samson, ziatypes by Jessica Somers, carbon prints by Dana Strout, and platinum palladium prints by both David Strasburger and David Wolfe.

Most of the photographers have New England connections, but the critical mass of photographers turning to vintage technologies is part of an international migration of artists to mediums that require more skill and work as digital technology put the means of taking, editing, and printing photographs into the hands of anyone with a digital camera and a computer.

[Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, 603-646-2808. University of New England Art Gallery, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland ME, 207-221-4499.]

Art at Colby

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

The Colby College Museum of Art is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition and a book, both entitled Art at Colby. The exhibition runs through February 21, 2010, but it is the book that I would like to call your attention to here. A book is the second life of art, so while not many readers will make it to the Waterville, Maine, college between now and February, Art at Colby ($50 hardcover) is an exhibition you can hold in your hand for years to come.

The Colby College Museum of Art began as a one-room gallery in the college's art and music building back in 1959. Today, Colby boasts one of the finest small college art museums in the country, both in terms of the collections and space. The museum grew almost entirely through gifts, both of art and money to build the wealth of galleries that now house that art. The Colby museum benefited greatly over the years by gifts from the Wing sisters of Bangor, the Jette family (Hathaway Shirt), the family of John Marin, Jere Abbott (first associate director of the Museum of Modern Art and heir to a Maine textile fortune), the Davis Family (Shaw's Supermarkets), the Lunder family (Dexter Shoe), Paul J. Schupf (an investment manager and Alex Katz collector), and artist Alex Katz, a trove of whose work is housed at Colby.

The person most responsible for the amazing growth of the Colby College Museum of Art, however, was Hugh J. Gourley, III, who served as director of the museum from 1966 until 2002. The college has never properly acknowledged Hugh Gourley's 36 years of selfless service to the museum, it is fitting that Gourley provides the written text that accompanies the illustration of the first work of art in the museum's collection, Winslow Homer's 1870 oil "The Trapper."

Art at Colby is a lavish book - 376 pages weighing over four pounds and filled with full-page color reproductions of 176 works from the Colby collection, each image elucidated by one of the 98 contributors to the book. The arrangement of the art is chronological, running from a Late Cypriot terra cotta rhyton (1450 to 1200 BCE) to Vietnam Veterans Memorial creator Maya Lin's 2008 "Pin River - Kissimmee," a modeling of the river system in stainless steel common pins.

Always the gracious host, Hugh Gourley is careful in his explication of Homer's "The Trapper" to explain that it was a gift of Mrs. Harold T. Pulsifer, who married into the family of Lawson Valentine, owner of a successful varnishing company that employed Winslow Homer's brother Charles and himself a major Homer patron in the 1870s. Mrs. Pulsifer gave the painting of a trapper in the Adirondacks to Colby in 1949 and loaned the college 11 other Homers.

Diana K. Tuite, the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art provides the text for several paintings by Alex Katz, whose work has a wing of its own at the Colby museum. Vincent Katz, the artist's son, wrote a long poem to accompany Jennifer Bartlett's 2003 painting of a map of the "Democratic Republic of Congo."

Art historian and Colby museum friend Gabriella de Ferrari addresses the Sol Lewitt "Wall Drawing # 803" and his "Seven Walls" concrete block installation that are signature Colby pieces. And Asma Husain, an architecture student at Rice University, celebrates Minimalist sculptor Richard Serra's "4-5-6," three solid cubes of oxidized Cor-Ten steel that greet visitors upon entrance to the museum's front door courtyard.

If you can't see the show, at least buy the book. It's a tribute to a sui generis art museum improbably located in central Maine.

[Colby College Museum of Art, 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville ME. 207-859-5600.]

Williams Museum Goes Over Niagara Falls

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

The Williams College Museum of Art has mounted a series of late fall exhibitions that celebrate and provide context for its 1878 William Morris Hunt masterpiece "Niagara Falls," a symphonic oil of one of America's iconic landscapes. Hunt (1824-1879) was a Vermont native who became a celebrated Boston portrait and landscape painter.

A Strong Impression: William Morris Hunt's Niagara (through January 31, 2010) brings Hunt's monumental painting together with oil, pastel, and charcoal studies as well as rare books, maps, photographs, Niagara Falls souvenirs, and an oil sketch of the falls by Frederic Edwin Church, whose 1857 painting of Niagara inspired his own.

Both Hunt and Church (1826-1900) painted Niagara Falls from its most startling aspect, the top of the broad, smooth horseshoe precipice from which the falls seem to be disappearing into a hole in the earth. The most impressive vantage on most waterfalls is from below, but Niagara Falls is a top down phenomenon, the Niagara River seemingly swallowed rather than spilled.

In William Morris Hunt and the French Tradition (through January 31), WCMA places Hunt's landscapes in the context of the influence of the naturalistic Barbizon School, painters such as Jean-Fran�ois Millet, Th�odore Rousseau, and Charles Fran�ois Daubigny. The art historical significance of the two Hunt shows is scholarly and insightful, but Williams also explores more modern and contemporary takes on Niagara Falls.

Alec Soth: NIAGARA (through January 10) presents Soth?s 2006 photographic project that examined Niagara Falls as an American clich� and romantic honeymoon destination. Alec Soth, a Minnesota artist, burst onto the contemporary photography scene in 2004, the year he was featured in the Whitney Biennial, he published Sleeping by the Mississippi, and he was invited to join the prestigious Magnum Photos agency. Soth is the photo-poet of the ordinary, a Midwesterner who casts a bemused, ironic eye on everyday life.

Soth's Niagara Falls is a rather sad settlement of seedy motels filled with honeymooning couples in various stages of nudity and neurasthenia, bored and a bit bewildered in what Soth calls "the aftermath of passion." He captures the tawdry and the gauche in gorgeous large-format color photographs.

And as a coda to Niagara grand and Niagara clich�d, Williams tops off its falls festival with Media Field: Niagara (through January 31), a pop culture look at vintage films that portray such iconic Americans as The Three Stooges and Marilyn Monroe in pilgrimages to the landmark waterfalls.

[Williams College Museum of Art, 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Williamstown, MA. 413-597-2429.]

Solotaire Playing in Portland

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Robert Solotaire passed away a year ago this month at a very youthful 78 years of age. Bob was a downtown kind of guy, a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Portland, particularly up in the West End where he ran a boarding house, wrote for the neighborhood newspaper, and painted the lively urban scenes for which he is well-known.

On the first anniversary of his death, Gleason Fine Art has mounted a memorial exhibition (through November 14) in its Portland gallery. For those who sorely miss Bob, the Gleason show is an opportunity to reconnect and reflect. For those who didn't know him and his work, it's an excellent chance to get to see a body of his supremely humanistic art - scenes of everyday life infused with the artist?s own peculiar sense of humor.

Bob Solotaire was born in 1930 in New York City, where his father ran a ticket agency on Times Square. That may account for the lightly theatrical quality of his view of the world. As a young man, he studied at Bard College, but his most important and enduring influence were the drawing classes he took at the Art Students League with German �migr� artist Ernest Fiene (1894-1965). Fiene seems to have instilled in Solotaire an appreciation for the mundane as theater, cities as settings for the little dramas of human existence.

Not only did Solotaire retain much of Ernest Fiene's social aesthetic, he also painted many of the same places Fiene painted - the streets of New York, the industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh, and the coast of Maine. Locally, Solotaire is probably best know for his paintings of Portland landmarks, but when he first came to Maine it was as a summer resident of coastal Harspwell. There he was mentored by romantic realist Stephen Etnier (1903-1984).

Solotaire and Etnier were married to sisters for a time, and the older, more commercially successful Etnier persuaded Solotaire to work outdoors directly from nature. Etnier himself had been a student of Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), so there is a clear artistic lineage running from Kent through Etnier and Fiene (who, like Kent, painted on Monhegan) to Solotaire. But where Kent's take on the world was one of heroic individualism and Etnier's one of elegiac sadness at the passing of a way of life, Solotaire's worldview was a more wryly upbeat one.

Bob Solotaire loved the business (busy-ness) of ordinary life and he celebrated it in paintings of people in the streets as well as in industrial landscapes of mills and quarries and paintings that made mechanical machinery look like amusement park attractions. He loved to work and his art was often about work, human enterprise.

Though he was a painter of impressive technical ability when it came to detailing visual complexities, Solotaire was not a photorealist, not a precision realist. He had an old fashion love of paint and didn't try to hide his brushwork beneath the appearances. He was a realist but not an illusionist. The human figures in his work were rarely life-like, instead possessing the slightly comic look of cartoons. If you don?t smile when you look at a Bob Solotaire painting, you may be missing the point.

[Gleason Fine Art, 545 Congress St., Portland ME, 207-699-5599.]

p.s. Click on the paintings to enlarge them.

Modulating a Maine Modernist

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Back in the 1950s, three artists lived in a building on 28th St. in New York City. Bernard "Blackie" Langlais lived and worked on the top floor. Alex Katz had a studio on the second floor. And Charles DuBack lived on the first floor above the street level lumberyard below. All three men attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and all three became closely associated with Maine art, albeit in decidely different ways.

Blackie Langlais (1921-1977) returned to his native Maine and became revered regionally as a sculptor of whimsical wooden animals. Alex Katz (b. 1927) became a prince of the New York art world and an esteemed summer resident of Maine, internationally famous for his flat, stylish paintings of family and friends. And Charles DuBack (b.1926), moving back and forth between Manhattan and Maine and between representation and abstraction, never really registered on the Maine art scene until fairly recently. While he had a long career in New York in the 20th century, DuBack seems to be making a 21st comeback in Maine.

In 2003, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport mounted a DuBack mini-retrospective and he also had exhibitions at Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta and Greenhut Galleries in Portland. Charles DuBack: Coming to Maine at the Portland Museum of Art (through January 3, 2010) and Charles DuBack: Early & Recent Work at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland (November 4-25) are the latest in a series of exhibitions bringing greater attention to this long overlooked painter.

Charles DuBack: Coming to Maine features both paintings and collages from the late 1950s when DuBack began coming seasonally to Maine and watercolors from 1998, seven years after he moved to Tenants Harbor year-round. Though most of the DuBack paintings I have seen are rather mainstream painterly landscapes, the work in the Portland Museum of Art show evidences the artist's debt to abstraction and shows his primary impulse as a painter to be reduction, a very modernist inclination. The 1950s pieces tend to reduce imagery to flat, non-overlapping areas of bright color. The 1990s watercolors are much looser, befitting the aqueous medium, but they too prefer discrete forms to integrated ones.

Artists tend to develop what I think of as "visual frequencies," a high fidelity aesthetic range that is a function of how closely their paintings correspond to perceived realities. Tightly rendered realism is a high-pitched frequency that resonates across a broad spectrum of viewers, from the romantic realism of an Andrew Wyeth to the photorealism of a Chuck Close. Purely abstract art tends to have a low visual frequency to which fewer viewers respond well.

Charles DuBack's art tends to oscillate at a mid-range visual frequency, pixilating perception now at the high resolution level of representation then at the low-res of abstraction. A lot of good painters work in this range (Milton Avery and Stephen Pace come first to mind), but I have a feeling that DuBack's modulation back and forth along this visual frequency over a long career has something to do with the fact that his art hasn't found a wider audience. The Portland Museum of Art and June Fitzpatrick Gallery shows may help. It is usually new work that commands new audiences and June Fitzpatrick reports that Charles DuBack has created several ambitious new paintings, some in excess of seven feet, for his November show.

[Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Sqaure, Portland ME, 207-775-6148. June Fitzpatrick Gallery, 522 Congress St., Portland ME, 207-699-5742.]

Pretty Tough Women at the Aldrich

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Though I have only been there twice, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is one of my favorite New England art institutions, focused as it is on bring new art and recent trends to a wider audience. You can be pretty sure of finding art that will expand your awareness and appreciation of what art can be any time you visit the Aldrich.

In Pretty Tough: Contemporary Storytelling (through January 3, 2010), curator M�nica Ram�rez-Montagut, who came to the Aldrich from the Guggenheim last fall, has assembled the works of nine women artists, all of whom take novel approaches to 21st narratives. The artists work in a variety of media and bring a great ethnic diversity to bear on visual storytelling.

Ambreen Butt, for instance, is a Pakistani-born artist who works in Boston. She draws on the tradition of Persian miniature painting to create drawings on Mylar that speak to the experiences of modern Muslim women.

Kate Clark, a New York artist born and bred, provides some of the most startling objects in Pretty Tough in the form of taxidermy sculptures that put human faces on wild animals - gazelle, zebra, bison. Stretching a zebra hide over clay and foam in "Matriarch," Clark creates a fascinating and disturbing trophy mount that embodies a story about both the death of nature and cultural attitudes about women.

Orly Cogan, an Israeli artist working in New York, uses vintage textiles to create overlay narratives about the exploitation and subjugation of women, a perfect correspondence between female needle arts and feminism.

Amy Cutler, whose work was featured in my October 9, 2008, posting, uses traditional illustration techniques and a light surrealism to create appealingly peculiar drawings of social and family life.

Kyung Jeon, a New Jersey-born artist, uses traditional Korean rice paper, watercolor, pencil and gouache in personal narratives that draw on Asian aesthetics and her own experience.

Catarina Leit�o, a Portuguese artist in New York, creates little pop-up books that depict people in protective clothing struggling against the forces of a toxic world.

Brazilian-born Rosana Palazyan is an artist of Armenian ancestry who embroiders handkerchiefs to commemorate both personal and cultural loss.

Argentinean artist Liliana Porter incorporates toy figurines in canvases that amount to inchoate narratives of human survival, female figures working to clean up the very paintings themselves.

And Stacey Steers of Boulder, Colorado, contributes a video entitled "Phantom Canyon" that uses 4,000 collages of Edward Muybridge motion photographs to create a fantasy narrative of a woman trying to escape the bonds of a hostile world.

"All of the artists in this exhibition use traditional or vintage techniques that are essential to the success of their concepts," writes curator M�nica Ram�rez-Montagut. "By engaging traditional modes of expression, their work holds a vast universal appeal while addressing less agreeable issues that are of great relevance in today's society. This highly stylized and crafted work - pretty - offers profound assessments of our contemporary world - tough."

[Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main St., Ridgefield CT, 203-438-4519.]

Black on White, Ink on Paper

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0100

The debut of Evolution of a Shared Vision: The David and Barbara Stahl Collection at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (September 26 to January 3, 2010) reminds me of the Temple Beth-El art shows in Portland, Maine, in the 1960s. Before there was a contemporary art scene in Portland there were the Temple shows, bringing modern art to Maine in the form of fine and affordable prints.

The first real works of art I owned were prints by Leonard Baskin and Ben Shahn. Frankly, given the strong black and white bite of the Stahl Collection, I'm kind of amazed that neither Baskin nor Shahn are represented in the Currier show, the first museum exhibition of a private print collection assembled over a lifetime of collecting.

David Stahl, a retired Manchester dentist, and his late wife Barbara, who was a much revered biology professor at St. Anselm College for close to 50 years, began purchasing prints in the 1950s, influenced initially by Charles Buckley, director of the Currier from 1955 to 1966, who, in Dr. Stahl's words, "encouraged us to look at art as more than just decoration." As simple as that sounds, it is profound. Most serious collectors begin just so, seduced by the connection that owning art makes between the artist and the collector.

In the 32-page Evolution of a Shared Vision catalogue, Dr. Stahl writes of being struck by "two wonderful Matisse lithographs" he saw in the home of friends in Boston.

"Those two prints," he writes, "were a stunning entry into a world we had barely glimpsed. We were captivated."

Inspired, the Stahls made their first purchase in 1956 - "two Georges Rouault circus performers, prints from the artist's series of aquatint etchings titled Le Cirque (The Circus)." In 2006, David Stahl purchased the eighth and last aquatint in Rouault's circus series.

The Stahl Collection on view in Manchester features close to 100 works on paper, most black on white etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts, many with a strong social content befitting the Stahls' progressive political views. The earliest work in the collection is Albrecht D�rer's 1509 woodcut Harrowing of Hell. The most recent is Clara Lieu's Line, an etching and aquatint of a line of people digging created in 2004, the year Barbara Stahl died. In that 500 year span, the Stahls found great prints by masters of the medium ranging from Piranesi to Picasso and Miro, from Callot to Cezanne and Chagall, from Daumier and Whistler to Beckmann and Grosz to Hopper, Marsh and Sloan.

Prints, being multiple impressions of the same image, have long appealed to art lovers on a budget, though these days print prices can be astronomical. When the Stahls began collecting in the 1950s, prints were so affordable that, by mutual agreement, either could purchase a print priced less than $100 while consensus was required for purchases of more than $100.

Even before the art market became inflated, however, there were ones that got away. Dr. Stahl regrets, for instance, not spending $1,000 on a D�rer that today might be worth $500,000. If you appreciate art, you come to understand that it too appreciates. Visit the Currier this fall and see the ones that didn't get away.

[Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester NH, 603-669-6144.]

Joel Babb's Real World

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Joel Babb possesses that preternatural ability to paint complex visual realities both with high fidelity and poetic expression. Hyperrealism is an aesthetic not always valued on the contemporary art scene these days but one he shares with a handful of other fine painters of Maine, among them Richard Estes, Linden Frederick, and Alan Magee.

In October, Babb's vivid visions of the Boston urban maze and the wild profusion of the Maine coast and woods will be celebrated in a pair of exhibitions - Joel Babb: Enlightened Perspectives at the venerable Vose Galleries in Boston (October 3 to November 21) and Joel Babb: The Process Revealed at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine (October 10 to March 27, 2010).

There are a great many artists who divide their time between New York and Maine, but Babb is one of a select few (John Walker and Jon Imber come first to mind) who are equally identified with Boston and Maine.

"Up here I'm a Boston artist," Babb told me several years ago when I visited his home and studio in rural Sumner, Maine. "Down there I'm a Maine artist."

Joel Babb has long been associated with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts where he earned his MFA in 1974 and had taught on and off ever since, but he has lived year-round in Maine since the 1980s. Keeping one foot in the city while living in the country has served him well, as his cityscapes and landscapes complement one another in their attention to detail and in the apparent though hard-won ease with which he is able to bring visual order to both the man-made and natural environments.

"The city's beauty of architectural forms requires linear perspective - the woods and streams demand a whole different strategy for coping with the complexity of nature's self-organizing forms," states Babb in the 24-page catalogue to his Vose exhibition. "Of course it's all nature, and the subject of painting is about what light is doing in the physical world."

Babb's Boston paintings, the masterpiece of which is a six-foot wide panorama of the city as seen from the Hancock Tower, find their poetry not only in the revelation of the play of sunlight across the chaos of buildings but also in the sense of history conveyed by the architecture. And unlike many photorealists, Babb often includes the people who inhabit the city, evoking modern life lived amidst 18th and 19th century buildings.

His Maine paintings, which include deep woodland interiors from wild Gulf Hagas and dramatic coastal landscapes from Mount Desert Island, are visions beyond history, seeking the eternal in the moment, the organizing forces of nature at work in uninhabited landscapes. It is the intricacy of Joel Babb's art that is initially compelling, but it is his quiet intelligence that informs them over the long term. He is an artist who is able to show you more than the eye can see.

The quintessential Boston & Maine artist with simultaneous exhibitions in Boston & Maine. A treat not to be missed.

[Vose Galleries, 238 Newberry St., Boston MA, 617-536-6176. Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., Lewiston ME, 207-786-6158.]