Wendy Mark: Recent Monotypes
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 37 West 57th Street, New York. Tel: 212. 750.0949
Lovers: The Drawings
of Rosemarie Beck and Paul Resika, 1968-69
Lori Bookstein Frine Art
Andrea Morganstern:
Nature's Pulse
Kimberly Venardos & Co.,1014 Madison Avenue at 78 Street, New York.
Tel: 212.879.5858
A version of this review
appeared in The New York Sun, February 26, 2004
By MAUREEN MULLARKEY
Wendy Mark, an accomplished
print maker, finesses several themes. But it is her near-miniature landscape
variations, dominating this exhibition, that best fulfill her stated
ambition to express a body of inherited forms in contemporary terms.
With contemporaneity a swollen currency, Mark's conversation with past
masters broadens her emotional range and achieves a certain eloquence.
Mark bypasses the disorder
of nature to seek motifs in the formal vocabulary of the great names
in landscape painting. With a cheerful kleptomania, she excerpts motifs
from the history of landscape-a veil of atmosphere, the color and movement
of clouds, the weight of skies or volume of a tree-making imaginative
reconstructions from the models provided by the masters. She also nods
to Wayne Thiebaud, who holds a patent on the candy-puff clouds that
Mark adopts on occasion.
Out of Mark's paraphrases
from tradition emerges a beau ideal of the natural world presented with
a modern directness and simplicity. Self-conscious titles (e.g. A Place
to Take Off From, Where He Was in August) signal that these are products
of the studio, not natural vistas. In their seeming specificity, they
achieve in litho ink what poet Marianne Moore sought with words: the
creation of "imaginary gardens with real frogs in them."
Look carefully at Halfway
Over, 2000. In a print under 6 inches square, Mark suggests a convincing
bank of considerable expanse, all its varied vegetation and the sky
above. An animated, improvised surface, stippled and wiped, yields an
optical charm that is all the more appealing for its informality. Reminiscent
of the textures and tonalities of Degas' late monoprints, this is Mark's
technique at its loveliest. All else on view can be judged against this
singular gem. And with one solitary exception, every thing succeeds
in holding its own.
That exception is the display
of 3 sets of cubes, similar to children's box puzzles. Each side is
covered with an image clipped from discarded prints and set under Plexiglas.
These are playful but slight, substituting cuteness for pictorial interest.
Mark serves herself best with work that makes no apology for a refined
sensibility.
Rosemarie Beck Untitled
1969
pencil on
paper, 11 x 15 inches
In 1968, Rosemarie Beck and
Paul Resika drew from the figure together, sharing models in a Washington
Square studio. Thirty five years later, the result of those sessions
is on the wall in an instructive pairing.
In Resika we see an ebullient,
sensuous colorist contending with the austerities of line and the discipline
of anatomy. His sketches leave an impression of things glimpsed over
the artist's shoulder, rehearsals that at the time of their making were
not intended for an audience.
Beck's drawings, the anchor
of this ensemble, are beautiful. Bearing the stamp of Cezanne in their
hatchings and broken contours, their communicative value is wholly personal.
They convey the volumes and expressive rhythm of the human body with
distinctive grace and tenderness.
Beck was a deft draughtsman,
unintimidated by the heightened challenge of figures in pairs. She made
effective use of shadows to unify separate masses and create spatial
veracity. With a gift for abstracting from bodily facts, she handled
the demands of male musculature with the same transforming ease she
brought to the arabesques of the female body. In an era of dreary eroticism,
her drawings make creditable John Donne's sweet cry: "Full nakedness!
All joyes are due to thee."
Andrea Morganstern
Arctic Cascade 2003
oil on canvas, dimensions to follow
Andrea Morganstern
is a painter in search of a subject. She creates delicate surfaces that
appear to exist for their own sake regardless of the motif. Love of
surface drives the picture, instead of the other way around. Her images
are distilled from nature-bamboo shoots, birds or, most recently, a
tracery of jagged, lightening-like forms-but with little of the natural
left in them.
Tender oil glazes, applied
one over the other, appear to have been breathed onto the canvas. The
mark of a brush is barely visible. Desert Pulse, 2003, is indicative
of her approach. Here, an undulating rhythm of pale cadmium and yellow
ochres combine to suggest the heat and movement of sand on a desert
floor. It is evocative, not realistic. Any illusion of reality is shattered
by the web of pale viridian cracklings that migrate across the picture
plane unlike anything in nature. These are patterns decorating a surface
still waiting for a purpose to support.
Artic Cascade, 2003, is the
most successful of the series. Red-black veining is perfectly pitched
in width, extra-fine so that the drawing of it does not call attention
to itself as something applied on top. It appears, instead, as if the
dappled canvas had been splintered by some inner force. The illusion
of fissure lends needed strength to the gentle play of blues and violets
of the ground.
Morganstern possesses a sensibility
more at home in a monastic scriptorum than on the modernist battlefield.
Like several artists in Kimberly Vernardos' stable, she seems a manuscript
illuminator deprived of a text. Artists with a sense of humor can turn
that deprivation on its head and pull whimsy from it. But Morganstern
turns inward to make a sacred text out of some vague spirituality culled
from Eastern philosophy.
Less concentration on Vedantic
practices and a deeper love for the visual world-and its great interpreters-would
give this artist the focus on which all possibility of emotional depth
depends.
