January 13 to February 19, 2011
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City, (212) 355-4545

The central theme of Brian Rutenberg’s paintings originated from his exploration of the South Carolina lowlands where he grew up. He has discussed its dreamlike power on his senses:  the merging of evanescent light and water and the pungent, tactile humidity that has a peculiar organic density.  In early works he painted tall rows of tree trunks and branches that expressively fade in and out of foggy atmosphere. In subsequent paintings a mysterious valley loomed abstractly in the center of the painting, emitting a moody, primordial light. The central “void” was often surrounded by the ghostly vestiges of trees symbolized as vertical hash marks or abstractly twisted branches. His palette got brighter as shapes expanded and contracted in dynamic play to the edges of his paintings, and as he laid down paint in thick swatches slathered on top of each other.  Heavily glazed areas in the center of his canvases took on a glowing viscosity. The artist has often mentioned his love of the Luminist American painting tradition of the 1850’s to 1870’s, particularly the work of Martin Johnson Heade who endowed landscape with a profound sense of melancholy and wonder.  Rutenberg’s art ever strives to straddle the divide between moody reminiscence of nature and a gradually evolving transformation of it into a Modernist-inspired vision.

His current exhibit at the Forum Gallery demonstrates a play of landscape and abstraction with renewed intensity, intermingling an ever-increasing assertion of boldly colored rectangular and triangular forms with his familiar compositional motifs. In one of the largest horizontal paintings, Low Dense (2010), willowy purple hash marks lay on top of a central brown and ocher space, laying out a staccato grid of lines that are almost jazzy in their spontaneity. On either side bright blocks of green, red, blue and purple burst into a crescendo of rhythmic improvisation, gradually fading into deep greens and navy blues towards the edges. His surfaces, with their brilliant blocks of color, bring to mind the high-keyed push-pull planes of Hans Hoffman. Slabs of paint, applied with a palette knife, generate a feeling of geological pressure that is broken up by more delicate painterly moments – a thin glaze or chance dripping – that break up the intensity of the surface and adds poetic variety and subtlety. Massed rectangles and triangles, compressed against each other and leaning on the edges of the canvas, balance relative gravities and weights of color, size and density. Energies at the edges provide subtle visual counterbalances while also guiding the eye across the span of the canvas with directional intent. It seems as though the artist’s inner vision of nature has taken a decisive abstract “Symbolist” turn, enhancing the mysterious luminosity of his previous work.

Rutenberg’s gradual transformation of nature into abstraction is an artistic tradition that has deep historical roots. J. M. W. Turner painted many of his seascapes with a romantic expressiveness that brought them close to the point of pure abstraction.  Claude Monet’s water lilies were the springboard that launched his brush into paroxysms of abstract color and gesture. However Rutenberg’s work has deeper ties to American forerunners of Abstract Expressionism like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield. Like them he seeks a subconscious and spiritual expression of nature in the American landscape through the discovery of abstract motifs and expressionism. Rutenberg’s unceasing play with color, value and painterly texture plants new possibilities within the expanding fields of his canvases.

Diane Thodos is and artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. . She was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002. She has exhibited at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

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Donald Kuspit, Joan Waltemath, and Karen Wilkin joined David Cohen to review Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read, June Leaf at Edward Thorp, Odd Nerdrum at Forum, Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly and David Hammons at L&M Arts.

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CHAIM GROSS: REINVENTING FORM
Forum Gallery

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: THE MAGIC FLUTE, DRAWINGS AND PROJECTIONS
Marian Goodman Gallery

Not many contemporary artists came as close as Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) to the virtuosic rendering of early Renaissance painting, and none took these talents in so unsettling a direction. The thirty-odd paintings at Forum Gallery span his career, highlighting the frantic variety of his work and its unique blend of delicate fantasy and raw provocation.

Early works have the jewel-like precision of van Eyck, though not quite the same gravity of color and space–and certainly not the same uplifting tone; several small, meticulous panels from the 60s depict raunchy sex scenes, while “Soccer Star” (1968) pictures an athlete who smiles obligingly as his abdomen splits open to reveal his entrails.

Mr. Gillespie went on to exploit a bewildering variety of subjects and techniques.  Celtic manuscript ornamentation, ceremonial Japanese costumes and Hindu tantric symbols appear, often in fantastical landscapes or eerie interiors. Many pieces are built up with thick applications of paint, sometimes sanded or scraped to reveal underlying layers; in others, real bits of wood and metal are combined with obsessively painted images of tiled walls and floors.

A rare tenderness prevails in the warmly smiling portrait, “My Aunt” (1988). More often, though, the artist seems determined to provoke. In “Bread Shrine” (1969) several tiny figures engage in obscure sex acts beneath a kind of industrial breadbox, on which the figure of Christ has been affixed like a decal. Was the artist hoping to expunge his strict Catholic upbringing? The passages of radiant, dainty modeling suggest something else—he’s intent on reclaiming the sacred for himself, by means of these luminous but mordantly disjointed images.

Presiding over the exhibition is the nearly eight-foot tall “Self-Portrait with Bread and Chakras” (1987-88). From an altar-like studio, the artist stares out dully, naked from the waist up and covered with emblems of mandalas and female genitalia. Behind him an ethereal Buddha competes with the carefully modeled forms of a telephone, hammer and visor. A darkly, closely worked panel attached below depicts what seems to be a disemboweled woman. Another panel, pure white, features a clock-like circle with knotted masses of paint for hands. Atop this sits a tiny, beautifully rendered female nude, exquisite in its detail and coloration, apparently cut out from another work—in fact, another world.

What does it all mean? Mr. Gillespie’s images rivet, but they refuse to edify the way van Eyck’s do. Clarification may be too much to ask of these memorable paintings—or from the artist’s feverish point of view, too little.

One floor above, the exhibition in Forum Gallery’s fifth floor space could hardly differ more in spirit. Here the lifework of Chaim Gross (1904-1991) unfolds as an act of affirmation, his pleasure evident in nearly twenty sculptures of acrobats and mothers with children. These works include wood sculptures from his early years, as well as the bronzes he turned to after the mid50s.

In the diminutive “Vanity” (1941), the wood grain enthusiastically follows a female nude’s rounding hips, their surfaces flirtatiously polished. “Baby Balancing on Feet” (1950), a supple, curving pillar of cocobolo wood, entices in a different way; at the top, emerging from the quickening curves, there appears a placid face—a poignant note that startles all the more when one realizes it belongs to a baby, balanced on the sinuous form of the upside-down mother.

In several stone pieces, broad, Mayan-like faces emerge evocatively from masses of onyx and alabaster. Mr. Gross’s inventions are less inspired in some of the bronze pieces; the six-foot tall “Three Acrobats on a Unicycle” (1957) depicts another column of athletic figures, but its even, chunky pacing feels less buoyant, as if the first fanciful conception had bogged down in its incarnation.

But even if Mr. Gross’s bronzes don’t have the rhythmic heft of Lipchitz’s, their humor is infectious. They hum with what Smithsonian director Joshua Taylor aptly called an “unqualified, exuberant enjoyment of life.”

Many famous painters have designed theatre sets, but artist William Kentridge has gone a step further: he’s also directing the production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” that premiered last year in Brussels and is now touring internationally.

A white South African, Mr. Kentridge had worked for many years in theatre and as a printmaker before gaining wide acclaim for his animation art in the 90s. The fifty pastel and charcoal drawings now at Marian Goodman served as the basis for “The Magic Flute’s” sets and animations.

Except for stray red marks, the drawings are executed completely in black pastel and charcoal. Rich tones, however, give a panoramic depth to backdrops of classical landscapes, some of them elaborated with Egyptian temples and astronomical diagrams. In smaller drawings of birds and cages, erasures demonstrate how these single sheets became the working arenas for animations. A model theatre about five feet wide handily shows the drawings at work. Illuminated by projections from the front and rear, the set comes alive with animations of dancing guardsmen, frolicking animals, and orbiting planets, all synchronized with portions of the opera’s soundtrack. Comets spiral and stream during the Queen of the Night’s climactic Act II aria.

Even without the benefit of color, this intimate mini-production charms. How does the full-size production look and sound? Opera-goers can see for themselves in April, 2007, when “The Magic Flute” comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Gillespie and Gross until February 25 (745 Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-355-4545).

Kentridge until February 25 (24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-977-7160).

A version of these reviews first appeared in the New York Sun, February 2, 2006

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This review was first published in The New York Sun, August 26, 2004

In August, galleries hang casual fare for accidental tourists, put their feet up and wait for fall. All the more reason, then, to applaud Forum Gallery for a vigorous selection of contemporary landscapes. Each of its twenty-plus paintings, drawings and watercolors is worth the viewing.

Go first to Israel Hershberg’s “City Center, Jerusalem” (1990-91). Painted from a hi-rise window, the view drops precipitously in the foreground, gradually fanning outward toward surrounding hills. Color intensity accumulates at the base of the vantage point, gradually dimming into the myriad indescribable neutrals of a sustained haze. The painting is saturated with mood and the fragility of its moment.

Hershberg makes no secret of his admiration for Antonio L¢pez-Garc¡a, the great contemporary Spanish realist. Hershberg’s composition paraphrases L¢pez-Garc¡a’s
“Madrid desde Torres Blancas” (1976-82); his sense of light derives from the same contemplative patience and austerity. More than a professional nod, Hershberg’s cityscape expresses the reverence of a painter who recognizes his own soul in the sensibility and work of another. Such empathy, expressed on an almost preternatural level of achievement, is rare in contemporary painting.

Robert Bauer’s small landscape of southern Spain and three gossamer drawings make a fine accompaniment. They share Hershberg’s humility before the visual world and his unconcern with fashion. Bauer’s landscape drawings are particularly compelling for their receptivity to the abstract mysteries of depiction. Silvery hatchings in hard pencil travel lightly over the paper, caressing the subject more than describing it. Sudden dark notes, made by the sharpened point of a softer lead, tether near-immaterial marks to the singularities of a locale.

Craig McPherson’s haunting monochrome pastel on canvas is based on Edgar Thompson’s historic photos of American steel works. Points of light punctuate the atmospheric sfumato of manufacture rising from clustered smoke stacks. Think of Seurat descending into Pittsburgh at its industrial height. Certain persuasions might interpret this as a sulfurous vision of hell; to me, it is elegiac and poignant.

Joseph McNamara frames the haze of sundown through the strict geometry of a dry dock. Fading light in the distance is captured in pale pinks and violets that weave, deepened and enriched, through the bedarkened greens and blues of the foreground structure. It is a more sophisticated excursion into the uses of color than the bravura exuberance of Brian Rutenberg’s “Until 2” (2002) that hangs nearby. For all its palette-knifed dash, Rutenberg’s kaleidoscopic charm is ultimately less satisfying than McNamara’s quieter, more deliberate analysis of his motif.

Davis Cone’s meticulous, brashly colored Art Deco picture houses strike the right balance between homage to cultural artifacts and wry recognition of the transience of Style Moderne. (Have fun finding his signature, hidden Where’s-Waldo style within the image.) Tula Telfair ‘s “Early Utopian Ideals” (2003) is lovely to look at and a good choice for anyone who prefers the idea of landscape-their own mental image of the sublime-to the disconcerting specifics of real places. Based on reproductions of 19th century American landscape painting, it has a bookish feel to it. But that is fine if you love books, too.

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Gretna Campbell (1922 – 1987) at Tibor de Nagy (724 Fifth Aveune, 212.262.5050) June 3 to July 3

Bill Scott: Process and Continuity at Hollis Taggart Galleries (48 East 73 Street, 212.628.4000) May 18 to July 9, 2004

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, 10 June 2004

An Odd Nerdrum exhibition is like a pastiche of old B-movies. Remember Louis L’Amour’s “Heller in Pink Tights:” A rag-tag theatrical troupe wanders the frontier struggling to survive. So too, the cast of Mr. Nerdrum’s costume epics. His generic post-catastrophe landscape conjures up “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.” Every day is The Day After Tomorrow in Nerdrumland.

Oscar Wilde said it took a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. It takes lights lowered to catacomb wattage to discourage merriment in front of Mr. Nerdrum’s special effects: that histrionic nosebleed, wolf-skin wardrobes from George Caitlin’s Indian gallery, the ghosts of Paintings Past and omens of artistic anguish.

His stock role of The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer takes its cue this year from Mel Gibson. “Second Birth” (2004) presents the Second Coming of himself as Christ. Antonello da Messina’s haunting bust-length image of Christ crowned with thorns, a 15th century panel, is stamped with Mr. Nerdrum’s features and set to resurrect from a lunar tundra.

Seabiscuit drew crowds recently, so expect a horse. “Horse Bath” (2004) gives us a white one, homage to Rembrandt’s “Polish Rider.” Head held at an unnatural angle, the goofy rider looks to be mimicking Balthus’ portrait of Baroness Rothschild. “Flock” (2004) has five naked men and a boy in a simian crouch, like chimps posing for Jane Goodall. The crown of thorns on each head is a portentous absurdity that lends credence to Mr. Nerdrum’s claim to have studied with Joseph Beuys.

“Five Singing Women” (2004) arranges five females on their backs, suggesting notes on a staff that ends with a half-note: another naked boy. All mouths are open, in song or rigor mortis? The women’s coverings-part sleeping bag, part shroud-slip off at just the right places. Breasts and beaver shots carry the day. “On The Boat” (2004) teases us with a threadbare couple, straight from some sagebrush saga, watching the distant approach of a phantom boat. The ark of salvation? The lifeboat from a lost starship seeking The Big Trail? Analogies are mixed but that happens with Odd.

His repertory of New Old Master showmanship camps in full feather past the footlights. Nothing here supports its own publicity as a Rembrandtian critique of modernity. Mr. Nerdrum is a parodist. That his parodies are mistaken for prophecies is a testament to P.T. Barnum’s grasp of public credulity and appetite for spectacle. In the end, failed prophecy is a form of nostalgia. It is dispiriting to see fine technique lavished on an art running on empty.

Gretna Campbell’s plein-air paintings are a gracious antidote to sham solemnities around town. They are on display in New York for the first time in eight years. It is a welcome event. Concentrating on work from the 1970s and ’80s, the exhibition features landscapes of the Maine coast, rural New Jersey and the south of France.

Ms. Campbell came of age among a generation of painters respectful of the achievements of Abstract Expressionism but confident that depictions of the natural world remained timely and significant. She was a realist in the best sense, faithful to the physical pulse of what she observed yet not subservient to appearances.

The apparent spontaneity of the work belies the rigorous studio preparation that preceded outdoor painting. Ms. Campbell drew on site, mapping details of the locale: the juncture of planes, the nodal points of her composition. Transferred to canvas, this initial linear schema was painted over in the studio with broad expanses of color chosen for chromatic interaction with the final paint layers improvised on the spot.

The pleasure of her work is in the variety and complexity of its color and the lush, textural weave of brushstrokes. Details of the local scene-a rocky shoreline, the slope of a field or angle of a trellis- are the raw material for a pictorial architecture built on the reciprocal effects of one color upon another. She worked boldly with brush and palette knife but the result is fastidious and transparent. The gestural energy of action painting enlivens an intimate sympathy for natural settings.

Specific shapes are loosely rendered while the sense of light and air is vividly realized. A snow bank resonates with touches of blue, delicate pinks and ochres. That distant haze, where sky and hill tops meet, reveals gentle modulations of viridian, cerulean, violet and yellow. “Along the Banks of Cranberry Cove” (1984) is a riveting dance of variegated greens interknit with supporting mauves, tender browns and golds.

The eye has work to do in these subtle, sophisticated paintings.

Bill Scott has no garden; so he invents his own. And what a high time he has in it.

Mr. Scott is an abstract painter working withing the Philadelphia colorist tradition that follows the lead of Arthur B. Carles, one of the most spirited of the early American modsernists. This is hs first exhibiton with Hollis Taggart.

With vivacity and a crazy quilt inventiveness, he evokes the retinal sensation of flower fields in a rambunctious patchwork of color segments. Depositing paint in abstract, lozenge-like shapes, Mr. Scott makes deft use of the see-through capacities and textures of oil paint. Pale tones are glazed over with darker ones; contrasting colors appear beneath the surface of each seemingly nonchalant swatch. Desultory dark lines traipse over the canvas, unifying disparate patches, much like the overstitching on traditional quilts.

Emotional range is keyed to the coloristic one. With the exception of “Night Garden,” Mr. Scott’s chromatic scale emphasizes smiling colors. Candied pinks pushing toward fuschia, ingratiating yellows and spring greens predominate. The work is unapologetically decorative, delightfully so. It would be cranky to wish for more metal amid the charm. Seduction is enough.

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Forum Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212 355 4545
through February 7

this article first appeared in the New York Sun on Thursday, February 12, 2004

Figure painting claims greater gravity and issues a tougher challenge than other genres. At its most humane, figuration asserts the primacy of life over the painter’s world of forms. Vincent Desiderio brings to the human figure grace of hand and, rarer still, grace of mind. Steeped in suggestion, his works are moral allegories. Realistically painted subjects function as signs whose meaning reveals itself to those responsive to the enigmas of the lived life.

Desiderio conveys the sorrow of living without sentimentality, morbidity or anger. “Contemplative Distance,” (2002), is a triptych balancing portraits of two broken men. One carries the marks of chronic pituitary disorder; the other bears the stigmata of Down’s Syndrome. Both are greeted with unfailing tact, their humanity ascendant over the mortifications of disability and disfigurement. Here, as in the finest of Desiderio’s work, nothing is in vain. Even the fetal x-ray of “Academy,” (2001), seems a formal gesture of salutation to the mortality we share with the rest of the organic world.

“Allegory of Painting,” (2003), builds a contemporary pietá from studio clutter. The artist cradles his brain damaged son with infinite tenderness. Surrounded by the sacramentals of his craft-optical devices, frames, photos, books, tools for making and viewing art-his attention belongs only to the child. All focus is on the limpid flesh of the boy and his bandages. White as the winding cloth in a medieval crucifixion, they simultaneously conceal and highlight his wounds. There is no bravura here. The painting is classical, not in its subject, but in its sanity and reticence. Its discretion is rooted in Desiderio’s own humility before the irreducible worth of this one frail life.

Only one painting strays from the source of his strengths. The inflated “Pantocrator,” (2002), is a grandiloquent tour de force, clever rather than convincing. The domination of space and of women, too, combine in a giant triptych better suited to the headquarters of Lockheed Martin than the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art which acquired it.

Much more compelling is the magnificent “Cockaigne,” (1993-2003), an ingenious echo of Peter Brueghel’s “Land of Cockaigne,” (1576). A monumental welter of art books scatters around a table covered with the shards of a meal. Pages fall open to paintings, a rollicking jumble of masters from the Florentines to the moderns. Human presence is insinuated though none is visible. Bones and crumbs-of art and food-are all we see. The pantagruelian feast is finished but what a romp while it lasted! It is a stunning performance, witty and cautionary.

“White Dress,” (2003), deserves mention for the incandescent beauty of it. So too, the luminous skull of “Isthmus,” (2000), unsettling in its delicacy. Overall, this is work that commands our gratitude. If he resists the pretensions of gigantism, Desiderio will earn his place among the masters he reveres.

Raymond Han is an accomplished still life painter, adept at depicting expensive things for expensive people: the just-so vase, exquisite china, exotic flowers. His current exhibition handles the human figure like any other still life. Han’s empathy with his subjects extends no deeper than their totemic value. These are images of class, psychologically vacant objects that nod to the good taste of the audience.

“Matthew & Alexandra,” (2003), offers bloodless props for a yuppie mail order catalog. Matthew is wan and bored. Chic Alexandra sits on the floor in her Manolo Blahniks, a signal that she never has to run for a bus. No furniture appears. The couple inhabit a genteel geometry: the circle of a mirror above, the rectangle of a portfolio below. The painting, like much else on view, is a greyed-down simulation of good breeding.

Nudity is a fact that figure painters must face on occasion. Han defuses the subject by pretending not to look. “Flora,” (2003), presents a sleeping female nude, composed with the same artificiality as the huge vase of lilies and amaryllis dominating the canvas. Here is a flower arrangement in two species, floral and human. Han’s male nudes, “Iannis I & II,” (2003), are posed discreetly sideways. No display of family jewels in the living room, please.

Han prefers artifice to living bodies. “Indigo Slip,” (2003), is a mannered riff on Balthus’ disquieting “Alice,” (1933), whose slip drops beneath one breast. Balthus’ figure is unconcerned by her own deshabille and exposure. Han’s model, by contrast, coyly lets down one strap, controlling the peep. Here is a single bared breast for the Better Sort. What could be finer.

The triptych “Three Women,” (2001-2), is another tease. In the first panel, the model stands in her gown. In the second, she raises it to reveal-what else?-a thong. You can almost hear, “Take it off!” The third panel gets to the point, frontal nudity. But instead of the frisson of nakedness, it is oddly funny. Shaved to fit the thong, her pubic hair calls to mind Hitler’s mustache. A Duchampian absurdity maims the image.

The double painting, “Rotation,” (2003), hints at what Han might do if he were engaged by his subject. The figure, a darksome young man, has a veracity that sets it apart. This single portrait is endowed with life, something distinct from banal imitation of physiognomy.

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If you were raised on Elihu Vedder, then this is the show for you. If not, you might find yourself averting your eyes from figure compositions that ought to have been an embarrassment to paint.

Erlebacher’s gift is for matter-of-fact description, a quality that stands her in good stead as a painter of still lifes. But it is a hindrance to the kind of mythopoesis she strains after in narrative work. Her skills and sympathies are better suited to trompe l’oeil than to story-telling. She serves herself best with the still lifes on view here. The successful figures in this exhibition are those in which a single model is set anonymously on a draped platform, back to the viewer, then lit and handled like any other nature morte. There are passages of real beauty in Erlebacher’s paint. Yet the overall impression is one of silliness and misplaced ambition.

Three Cats at Dusk is a working compass to Erlebacher’s difficulties as a narrative painter. Three air-brushed women–pussies, oh my!–languish on a rock set against the wastes of an unspecified landscape that looks borrowed from Odd Nerdrum’s last show. Skies that never were are done in a ruddy labial rose. One female arches her upper torso heavenward in a gesture that suggests impalement on a dildo. A second is forced into an unnatural crouch to serve compositional needs. Another is laid flat for the same reason. Then there’s the obligatory spread of classical drapery. Rose-red, It flows to the ground from under the haunches of the sweetheart transfixed on . . . whatever. At an asking price of $35,000, it is clearly intended as the exhibition’s show-stopper. So it is.

Add to this The Tarantula Nebula. On offer is a naked–no drape this time–man and woman assuming the missionary position on center stage somewhere at the edge of the planet. Real action is overhead in the Milky Way. Shooting nebulae explode in marvelous colored dots all over the canvas. This is no ordinary f**k, folks; this is galactic fusion. [Fusion II is the title of a neighboring piece.] By now, the equation of fireworks and sex is as haggard as a cinematic train roaring into a tunnel. But these are compositions for an audience without memory. And without a grasp of art that goes deeper than market price. What else could explain all these implausible, listless women languishing in the buff near one shore or another, resembling something beached, washed in with the tide, less lively than drftwood?

The entire shining ensemble of multi-figure compositions evokes the tact and polish of that other tasteful old venue, Playboy. And why not? An approximate formula–part exoticism, part kitsch–worked for Vedder. It still works, albeit with an Viking slant and more tactile surface, for Nerdrum. No reason a woman should not have a go at the old game.

More worrying is Erlebacher’s Adam and Eve (The Return). Once past the fine foreground figure of Adam, bent to the ground in remorse, the painting sinks into the dangers of literalism. A wild-eyed Eve lies supine across a rock slab (the same one supporting Three Cats on the next wall). Here comes another blasted landscape, this one on loan from Vedder’s The Questioner of the Sphinx. Under a pitiless sky, an incongruous trail of long white drapery covers Eve’s crotch, providing a spot of relief from the punitive gloom. A fading glow, visible through a crevice in the ground, suggests Eden as some sort of Middle Earth from which Adam and Eve have been propelled upward and out.

The literalness of the depiction makes comedy of Eve’s loin cloth. [Did she work a loom in Eden? Was she given time to pack up her linen or did the angel hand her a valise?] Worse, it snuffs all life out of the ancient story, one of the few cultural remnants still recognizable by all of us. The Genesis tale is painted in outmoded, fundamentalist terms, as if Eden had longitude and Adam and Eve were historical characters. Erlebacher approaches the myth as though it were a moment in history, tacked to the wall like a moth and just as dead. One more still life.

Biblical mythos is as trustworthy–or no more untrustworthy–for illuminating the ground of our condition as the modern mythologies of Freud and Jung. But expulsion from Eden is no longer creditable as the loss of some idyllic place, all date palms and fair weather. It has relevance to us moderns only if it is greeted from within and retold for our time. Our own Paradise Lost is Western civilization’s ancestral faith in the meaning of man and of history. To be east of Eden is to carry our chosen despair with us. It is a cultural burden, not a material one. Despair flourishes in the rich, rotted undergrowth of plenty as surely as it exists in squalor and wasteland. Adam and Eve’s predicament, as depicted by Erlebacher, could be fixed with a Swiss Army knife and a cell phone.

The empurpled prose of the press release [“Lust, hunger, greed, heat, cold, beauty, horror: all are here. . . .With formidable intellect, amazing skill and tremendous talent, Erlebacher enables a journey to a place where our identities are drawn and defined.”] is less appropriate than an observation once made by Wendell Berry: “The significance–and ultimately the quality–of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.” Erlebacher lacks purchase on the story she inhabits.

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