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

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.

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 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.

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Rosemarie Beck died in New York in July, 2003. This posthumous exhibition is the final stop on a tour that originated at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, in 2002. It is her first in Manhattan in fifteen years. Since the closing of the Ingber Gallery in 1989, Beck’s work has been difficult to find. She seems to have made little effort to exhibit outside the academic circuit. Gratitude is due the Studio School for hosting this original and long overdue show.

Beck’s early history as a painter is askance of today’s norm, with its emphasis on university art departments. A graduate of Oberlin college with a B.A. in art history, Beck’s formal training was idiosyncratic. Her primary shaping influences were life-drawing sessions at the Art Students’ League and commentaries from Robert Motherwell, in whose studio she worked as a young mother and fledgling painter. Add to this friendship with Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin, her neighbors in Woodstock. It was an auspicious, liberating beginning,

I fell in love with her painting when I first saw it. Such beautiful crystalline color! That hearty, confident brush stroke that never fussed, never second-guessed or sweetened itself. She drew with the brush, putting paint down and leaving it there, as if in celebration of William Morris Hunt’s dictum: “Draw firm and be jolly!” She worked her way around her forms with vibrant, delicately modulated color notes–a lesson learned from Cezanne. Her dynamic, buttery touch was a conscious bow to the shimmering abstractions of Philip Guston in the 50’s. Ultimately, it became a signature mark that brought a dancing, syncopated quality to her surfaces that continues to enchant.

Seeing her paintings again, after a long lapse of years, my first response was precisely what it had been when I was a young painter. In sheer physical terms, her work is as ravishing as ever. On other levels, I find myself-quite to my own surprise-ambivalent. Yes, of course, you can go home again. But when you get there, things are different.

Her many references to other paintings distracted me this time. Sorting out the quotations became a task in itself that siphoned attention away from what the paintings achieve on their own. Artifice ought to be transparent, directing focus away from itself in order to emphasize a larger purpose. But many of Beck’s referents seemed less like aids to invention than substitutes for it. For example, which dead Christ-we have a choice-provided the model for “Eurydice Mourned,” (1971)? A Christ figure with female breasts leaves the impression of a chunk of art history swallowed whole, undigested. And what are we to make of that discreet loincloth on a female whose breasts are left exposed? Models have to be chosen carefully to avoid a clash of meaning and tone between the antecedent and its inheritor.

Beck used classical subjects as pretexts for the act of painting. She employed ancient narratives in much the same way a composer makes use of musical staves. Each serves primarily as a support for notation, musical in one, painterly in the other. My favorite painting in this exhibition is “Antigone Before Creon,” (1991). The lively tempo of paint marks, tonal subtleties, and faceted white dresses played against brooding blue-greens and blue-blacks of the middle distance are deeply satisfying. But satisfaction on the retina exists in inverse proportion to satisfaction with the theme. The painting gives little hint of the gravity of its own subject.

The story of Antigone is one of the great founding myths of Western culture. Our own faith in “inalienable rights” is rooted in the Sophoclean understanding of transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable. What we believe about the dignity of the human person finds expression in the tale of Antigone.The profundity and civilizing grace of the myth is not easy to convey pictorially. Certainly not for modern painters who inhabit a cultural moment unmoored from the deepest currents of its own history. The temptation is to turn ancient myth into a simple narrative (most commonly, of individual rebellion) or costume drama. Beck’s classical references are ornamental, all flourish and arabesque. Her dramatis personae are as radiant and cheerfully colored as guests at a mid-summer garden party. Not quite the troupe to evoke a tragic sense.

In a certain respect, Beck’s small free-wheeling gouaches are the most successful pieces in the show. I particularly liked the pastel-toned ones, in which line and color join in free, fluid movement. These are brief cantatas of great charm. At heart, Beck was a musician, not a tragedian. And charm occupies a world apart from tragedy.

In the 50’s and 60’s, when figuration was on the defensive, Beck’s painting was rightly considered gutsy, against the prevailing rush to abstraction. But those days are past. Now, we can look at the work without reference to a looming polemic. Viewed without that external enhancement, Beck’s figures seem less vital than they once did. The finest figure on display is her own self-portrait. She depicts herself as a physically imposing, even imperious, presence. There is a veracity and power here that is lacking in other, psychologically thinner, figures. In her own mirror was a fine model for Creon, if she had wanted it.

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1968. Year of the “Events”. The Summer of Love and all that. In a studio in New York’s Washington Square, two young artists stage an event of their own: a pair of lovers sit for them, warding off winter with poses of passion.

“Erotic Resika” is a tautology, for whatever he depicts- it can be a boat in harbor- is X-rated. In his pastels of the loving couple, drawing is as frenzied as any amorous act. Hot contrasts of orange andpink sweat it out in conté. These drawings were apparently saved from a studio fire: sfumage casts appropriately smouldering looks.

Beck brings a contrastedly classical equilibrium to the life room. She is apollonian to his dionysian. Her couples could equally be resting after love or on the flight into Egypt. She views the lovers through seven veils, one each for Shakespeare, Ovid, Titian, Michelangelo, Correggio, Tiepolo, and lastly, her own “Oh”: a secret pleasure in unexpected shapes, the flirtatious possibilities of a smudge, a spatial abbreviation, a coy rhyming of buttock and member. Less overtly visceral, she nonetheless taps a whole erotics of negative space, a hermetic language of love.

Where Resika’s gaze joins the lovers to make it a threesome, Beck brings a post-coital langour to the same poses. But her classical serenity is a timely reminder: love wasn’t invented in 1968 after all.

this text is reproduced with permission from the exhibition announcement card

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