Book Art at Fleisher Art Memorial

Published by The Bulletin on October 16, 2007.

Textbook Perfect: 'Anatomy Of The Book' At Fleisher Art Memorial
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Words and images saturate our society. From newspapers, novels, and blogs to advertisements, artwork, and films, we organize our communications into verbal and visual mediums. What happens, then, when the two forms intersect? When text becomes image; when image occupies the structure of a book?

“Anatomy of the Book,” a book arts show currently on display at the Fleisher Art Memorial’s Suzanne Fleisher and Ralph Joel Roberts Gallery, considers this melding of text and image. Four local book artists, Carol Barton, Hedi Kyle, Tom Leonard, and Mary Phelan, present an assortment of works – both art books and illustrations – that covers traditional bookmaking, printmaking, and drawing techniques while also exploring uniquely creative interpretations of the book form.

Carol Barton’s “Alphabetica Synthetica” begins with a standard definition of “synthetic” and then continues with an alphabetical listing of absurd vocabulary related to artificiality. A is for “Alterations, Animations, Acetate Assimilations,” with the culturally cunning list continuing all the way through to “Y2K” and “Zooplastic Zombies.” Each spread contains a pop-up square of the letters represented, giving the impression of wooden building blocks emerging out of the crevices. Printed on pastel-colored accordion-fold pages, this bizarre primer combines the crisp appearance of a child’s learn-to-read book with an obscure text that clearly requires adult recognition and humor.

Another playful book, Mary Phelan’s “Exquisite Horse, a Printer’s Corpse” creates fantastical animals by pairing a page showing a hypothetical back-half of an animal with another page showing an equally unexpected front-half. The example on display matches the back-side of a horse – skeleton showing through transparent skin, tail created out of text – with a front-side diagram of a man inside a huge clown puppet. Although subsequent pages are not visible, the format suggests transition, changeability, as pages could potentially be rearranged to construct myriad organisms.

Many of the pieces distort traditional assumptions about books by cutting out parts of pages or adding protruding elements, requiring a three-dimensional “reading.” Hedi Kyle’s “CFBL Fold” provides physical examples of various paper-folding techniques, inserting the samples among the printed pages. She uses very little text, relying instead on the real-life demonstrations of the actual folded paper in this pseudo-instruction manual. Carol Barton’s “Tunnel Map” takes a series of round maps, positions them parallel to each other, cuts holes through the centers, and inserts drawings of familiar landforms – ocean waves, grassy hills, rocky mountains. For the full effect, the viewer must peer through the holes to view the overlapping layers of landscapes. The round, unmoving pages and three-dimensionality expand typical definitions of “book” while maintaining the distinct pagination and sense of information-sharing common to ordinary reading.

Not just books, the exhibition also showcases vibrant flora and fauna illustrations by Tom Leonard and exploratory photographs and drawings by Mary Phelan. These two-dimensional works isolate critical elements of bookmaking, while also helping position the books in their broader context of the visual arts.

Unfortunately (and somewhat understandably), nothing can be touched, so the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book remains elusive. Entire pages stay hidden, and any sense of narrative or continuity or discovery disappears in the immobility of the pages. If only book arts shows could find a display option that functions somewhere between a library and a gallery, allowing for increased viewer interaction with this necessarily tangible art form. Although your eyes will enjoy the text-image feast, your fingers might twitch in anticipation of turning to the next page.

©The Evening Bulletin 2007

Polly Apfelbaum at Locks Gallery

Published by The Bulletin on October 9, 2007.

'Big Love' At Locks Gallery
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Imagine a field of wildflowers viewed from above. Now flatten the flowers into solid, bold colors of varying sizes, eliminate all background elements, rearrange them into circular patterns, print them on enormous sheets of paper, and hang them on a wall – you’ll have something similar to Polly Apfelbaum’s current show Big Love at Locks Gallery in Old City. It’s dazzlingly vibrant, decoratively detailed, and, well, flowery.

As excited as I was that Apfelbaum’s work was back in town, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed that this artist who I know best for intricate, large-scale floor pieces has returned to plain-old hang-it-on-a-wall artwork. The Abington native’s last show in Philadelphia, in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art, featured a number of “fallen paintings” – sprawling two-dimensional compositions of hand-dyed, individually cut-out scraps of fabric, arranged in circles and crystalline forms on the floor. They enveloped the space, interacting with the architecture and the viewer’s own movement to appear in a constant state of flux and pulsation. With inspiration as unexpected as Dalmatians and the Powerpuff Girls, the pieces conveyed a lively sense of humor and pop culture affinities.

The current show at Locks Gallery retains the pop culture and a touch of humor, but loses some of the dynamism by reverting to a standard vertical art-viewing format. Instead of the transitory effervescence of the floor pieces, these new wall pieces dominate and demand attention. Most of the pieces are over six-feet square; all are woodblock monoprints on handmade paper. Using variations on a flower shape (some look more like clouds, some like childish daisies, and some like long-tentacled anemones), Apfelbaum reprints the shapes in a range of sizes and colors, never touching, never overlapping. The plain white of the paper serves as the ground, holding together all of the carefully organized forms; the imprinted edges of the woodblock add subtle texture and dimensionality. Colors are bold, flat, with myriad manifestations of similar hues, so that no one color becomes dominant or overly familiar.

Apfelbaum’s typical organic geometry arranges the shapes into circular patterns, often containing a central element, details in the four corners, and a contrasting array of shapes filling in the gaps. They bring to mind the meditative qualities of mandalas, the folk art of Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and quilts, and the careful planning of public gardens. The repetition of generic, almost iconic, shapes turns them into pixels or patches or wallpaper patterns, so shapes become structural and cannot be viewed out of the whole context. Although not overt, the playful spirit of the Powerpuff Girls lurks around the corners, infusing the flowery, feminine forms with a snarky energy.

In such bold surroundings, the most beautiful and striking moment ends up also being the most subtle. In “Love Park 16” (2007), the busyness of color and pattern suddenly ends in a wash of white background. Looking closely, however, you see the imprint of white flowers against the white paper, the difference of color so slight that from a distance it becomes imperceptible. The monochromatic continuation of the shapes, combined with the physical imprint of the woodblock, creates an area of pseudo-starkness and nearly invisible detail that runs contrary to every other piece in the room. It’s a powerful moment, worth engaging for a long time; worth walking around the gallery and indulging the vivacity just to return to this one tranquil moment.

Although not Apfelbaum’s most engaging show, Big Love fits comfortably within her oeuvre and continues her creative engagement with large-scale repetition, vibrant color, and distorted femininity. It’s nice to have her back in town.


©The Evening Bulletin 2007

Renoir Landscapes at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin on October 2, 2007.

Revel in Renoir
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

If you had asked me last week about the art of 19th-century French painter Pierre-August Renoir, I would immediately have thought of picnics and dances, rosy-cheeked children and voluptuous nudes. However, after seeing Renoir: Landscapes, an exhibition currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I now have a sense of the broader scope of his work and his life-long attachment to impressionistic landscapes. It is exactly what the curators hoped would happen.

Renoir once commented, “Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” And indeed, his landscapes present a lovely, tranquil world, a carefully cultivated wash of color and light where misery and rain clouds seem impossible. In the midst of the Industrial Revolution’s rise of a middle class with leisure time and mobility, Renoir captures the vitality of gardens and renovated city streets, making every moment seem idyllic and care-free. His gestural brushstrokes convey the experience of being in a particular setting, manifesting the movement of wind and sea spray and the rustle of leaves as well as the stillness of flowers and sunlight. Associate curator John Zarobell relates Renoir to his contemporary and comrade Claude Monet, suggesting that if Monet was concerned with vision (“only an eye” to use Cezanne’s famous quote), then Renoir was concerned with feeling, able to “give you hay fever” just by looking at his grassy fields.

The curators organized the exhibition into loosely chronological themes, so that each gallery explores a certain aspect of Renoir’s landscape oeuvre. To provide a context, the entry room contains photographs and illustrations from the 19th century, showing concurrent attitudes toward landscapes and landscape painters. At the beginning of Renoir’s career, landscapes remained a lesser art form, usually considered sketches for paintings of historical, classical, or biblical stories. The figure was preeminent; Nature (with a capital N) supported the figure by giving it context and an emotional backdrop. As Renoir and his Impressionist colleagues challenged the conventions of the art academy, they pulled landscapes into a position of prominence and reversed the figure-ground relationship. The first gallery highlights the role of figures in Renoir’s landscapes, with a mix of outdoor portraits where a clearly defined figure dominates (“Woman with a parasol and small child on a sunlit hillside,” 1874) and panoramas where groups of figures meld into the background (“La Grenouillère,” 1869). In these examples, figures remain important but begin to integrate into the surrounding environment. They aren’t telling grand stories, but acting out everyday life with an emphasis on immediate experience.

The next room flips the coin, showing only “pure landscapes,” where figures are incidental or entirely absent. As a newly emerging style, these landscape-only paintings benefited from Renoir’s innovations of capturing movement and physical sensation. The billowing clouds in “The Gust of Wind” (c. 1872) seem to be rushing across the horizon, bending branches and rippling fields of grass. As modern viewers, accustomed to figureless artwork, we may miss the significance of these pieces that departed from the conventions of the time to portray a world unencumbered by human heroism or mythology, a purely “in the moment” existence.

The “Impressionist Landscape” room may feel the most familiar to many visitors, with its compositions combining the natural world with human structures and activities in a burst of light and painterly gesture. “The Skiff (La Yole)” (1875) portrays all of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution through the language of Impressionist painting, showing suburbanites out for a leisurely row past a well-manicured country estate with a train approaching from the background. Renoir painted several of the pieces in this room side-by-side with Monet, and you can observe their mutual exuberance for and exploration of their newfound style. In the next gallery of cityscapes and gardens, you see additional evidence of their friendship in Renoir’s painting “Claude Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil” (c.1873), a self-reflective, nearly deconstructionist look at the experience of landscape painters of the time. Monet stands just outside his urban garden fence, rows of houses in the background, focusing on his personal corner of natural beauty.

Cityscapes and gardens give way to a room devoted to seascapes, as Renoir took his first trips to the coast, and continue with paintings from his travels to Algeria and Italy. Renoir was able to modify his language of choppy brushstrokes and vibrant colors to express his experiences in these foreign locales. In “The Jardin D’Essai, Algiers” (1881), he captures the movement of an alley of palm trees, unfamiliar flora for a Parisian, with an explosion of gold and green lines of paint. Several paintings, again, show his relationships with his contemporaries, and the works created alongside Cezanne and Monet reflect the influence of their styles while remaining unequivocally Renoir-esque.

Even in the last years of his life (shown in the “Coda” room), when rheumatoid arthritis so crippled his body that paintbrushes had to be strapped to the backs of his hands, Renoir had himself carried outside to paint the landscape. He remained committed to observing and rendering the world around him. By focusing on everyday vistas and familiar activities, Renoir and the Impressionists declared that modern life IS history, paving the way for future generations of artists to explore the immediate world around them. The Museum’s exhibit puts that transformation into context, fleshing out the social and cultural implications of landscape painting in the 19th century and creating a very “pretty” world indeed.

Perelman Building at the PMA

Published by The Bulletin on September 28, 2007.

A New Place to Worship Art
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

In its venerable status as collector of all things beautiful, historic, and important in the ongoing development of art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art sits as a temple on a hill, an imposing structure protecting its treasures and inviting reverent visitors to stand in awe. If the PMA is the temple of art, the new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building is, perhaps, the seminary – devoted to study, conservation, and intimate viewer experience.

The behind-the-scenes quarters of the Perelman Building, off-limits to visitors, house state-of-the-art conservation spaces, a necessary expansion for maintaining the museum’s ever-growing collection. Several study centers (such as the Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs) offer appointment-only visitations, making possible in-depth research and exploration of the museum’s holdings. Undoubtedly the heart of the museum, these vital operations of conservation and research, although not visible to the general public, deserve such a vibrant new space.

What you CAN see, however, is worth the visit.

The façade stands as a testament to 1920s prosperity, with Art Deco detailing enough to make anyone gape upward as they open the doors. Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance, the company that built the 80-year-old building, clearly wanted its clientele to sense power and prestige, security and solvency. The lobby’s marble floor and ornate ceiling retain those high-life qualities, the passage of time infusing the atmosphere with nostalgia and historical appreciation.

Stepping out of the lobby opens up another world. Faced with the problem of reconciling the historical building with the modern expansion of galleries and work spaces, architecture firm Gluckman Mayner created a Skylit Galleria that superbly joins the disparate sections. The original wall stands vertically, rectangularly, with painted window casings and ordinary yellow brick. The new opposing wall slants forward in a distorted mirror-image, all contemporary design and texturized brick, with a row of optically slanting doorways. The skylights overhead, industrial second-floor walkways, and alcoves for sculpture tie together the two walls, so they seem like cousins or not-so-identical twins, each one inextricably linked to the other, each emphasizing the other’s strengths and inherent beauty.

The Galleria’s doorways lead to new gallery spaces showcasing segments of the Museum’s permanent collection, with spaces dedicated to photography, costume and textile, modern design, and sculpture. Each room has been designed to most effectively display its particular oeuvre – the Julien Levy Gallery of photography introduces extra hanging space with the inclusion of additional walls and pillars throughout; the Joan Spain Gallery protects fragile textiles and enhances costumes with dim lighting and dramatic displays against dark grey walls; the Collab Gallery highlights modern design using a variety of display cases and elevated floor pedestals; and the Exhibition Gallery, designed for sculpture, features natural light from two rows of tall windows with the requisite open spaces and white walls of a contemporary gallery.

Unfortunately, each gallery exists in isolation from the others, aggressively compartmentalized so that you cannot move from one gallery to another or visually link artwork in adjoining rooms. In a postmodern era of non-hierarchy and pluralistic association, a gallery system should seamlessly pull viewers through the range of art-making, allowing diverse and even opposing streams of art to co-exist, in much the same way the Skylit Galleria melds different generations of architecture. At the Perelman Building, the theatrical evening gowns might enjoy a conversation with the clever furniture, which might in turn have something to add to discussions of contemporary sculpture, but instead, the gallery structure refuses their interaction. Even at the main PMA building, not exactly a tribute to postmodernity or contemporary architecture, chronological and geographic art designations give way to a fluid floor plan that maximizes aimless wandering and facilitates unexpected visual connections.

In any case, the exhibits themselves are lovely, as you would expect. Early 20th-century photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s lifetime of work ranges from studies of Philadelphia skyscraper construction to family portraits to studio sessions with Georgia O’Keefe. The fashion display includes three Philadelphia designers, James Galanos, Gustave Tassell, and Ralph Rucci, following trends in women’s dresses from the 1950s through today. In the modern design gallery, the expected collection of eclectic furniture sits alongside tea sets, advertisements, and even the sleek design of the brand new iPhone. (You might wonder, as I did initially, whether such a hot commodity belongs in an art museum’s holdings, but Apple has undeniably done some outstanding product design, and it IS a modern design collection.) The sculpture currently in the Exhibition Gallery expresses a range of modern and contemporary sculptural concerns, with Sol LeWitt’s geometry, the organic handiwork of Martin Puryear, a natural installation by Richard Long, and the transitory possibilities of Félix González-Torres. And book-lovers should be sure to wander to the second-floor library to see the selection of rare books on display.

The Perelman Building won’t replace the PMA as the center for the worship of all things art, but it offers a focused space, a specialized environment for observation, research, and conservation. Students and scholars can delve into historical, cultural, and technical explorations, while viewers can enjoy the PMA’s lesser-known collections and revel in the diversity of visual expression.


©The Evening Bulletin 2007