Ellen Lanyon was such an indomitable spirit, the very personification of vitality, that likely few of the many younger people who gravitated towards her are likely to have given much thought to her vulnerability.  That at least is the case of this writer who has been privileged to enjoy the friendship of the artist for the best part of ten years.  It comes as a tremendous shock to learn that last night, October 7, Ellen suffered a fatal heart attack at immigration after flying back from England where she had spent two weeks working on a new edition of prints.  She was 86.

Lanyon was both a leading force in the Chicago art scene and an equally beloved one in her adoptive home of New York City.  She had taught for many years at the Art Institute of Chicago and was connected with several different generations of imagists in the windy city.  The formal finesse, humor and literary liveliness of her collage-oriented painting and printmaking sensibility captured perfectly a fusion of Americana and Surrealism that was at once pure Chicago and totally her own.

Ellen was a doyenne of noble causes whether they entailed public activism or private mentorship.  Her tastes were passionate but catholic and unbiased by anything other than quality and integrity.  And however devoted and creative she was in her various artistic and social struggles – the loft movement, the women’s movement, teaching at the Art Institute, Cooper Union, SVA, her leadership role at the National Academy and other artist-run organizations, historic preservation in Chicago, her collecting of extraordinary machines and toys that also made their way into her work – her art came first.  She was prolific, ever open to change, and utterly stalwart in her struggle for the authentic image.

Information regarding a memorial service and further tributes will follow.

The post Ellen Lanyon: 1926 – 2013 appeared first on artcritical.

The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World  at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, November 17, 2012 to April 7, 2013.

In his now notorious remarks in the New York Times,  Ken Johnson invited anyone with a theory about the kind of art “women tend to make” to test it out by visiting the exhibition, The Female Gaze, at the Pennsylvania Academy.  My 13-year-old daughter, who has attended many contemporary exhibitions, revealed her theory when she quipped, “Dad, are there going to be a lot of vagina paintings in this show?”

In fact, the sole match for her particular view of women’s art was an untitled test plate from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1976).  The works in the show might fit any description or label that has been applied to art: abstract, representational, conceptual; personal and political; militant and conventional; academic and outsider. Anyone who attends this show with theories—or better put, stereotypes—of women’s art in mind is bound to be disappointed.

The Female Gaze celebrates an inspired addition to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ venerable holdings. Collector, philanthropist, and artist Alter Linda Lee Alter has donated over 500 works in every style and medium imaginable. In the same gallery one finds Daisy Youngblood’s gorilla sculpture; Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, jewel-like abstract painting; Catherine Murphy’s hyper-real painting of a gun target stapled to a tree; Kara Walker’s silhouettes of antebellum figures; and an enameled metal sign by Jenny Holzer.

The bequest is all the more important when understood side-by-side with the Academy’s existing collection, enshrined next door in its landmark Furness building.  Despite efforts to tout a 200-year history of friendliness toward women, the Academy’s past accessions are rather one-sided, and might just as aptly be called the Male Gaze.

During an interview, Alter explained to me that most of the institutions on the short list for this bequest were male-dominated. She believed, however, that her gift to the Academy would be transformative. The size of the existing collection meant that the donated works would be visible, and the bequest came with a commitment by the staff to take care of them and display them alongside existing art.

While Female Gaze reveals no clear tendency among women artists, it does evince the collector’s preferences. The persistence of painting, and especially figure painting, is deeply felt in this selection of work. Greeting us very directly at the entrance are Diane Edison’s painted Self-Portrait (1996) and pastel Nude Self-Portrait (1995). In this second piece the artist gazes down haughtily at the viewer from between her pendulous breasts.  The African American artist is known for her intense portraiture, and in this case gives us a rich expanse of brown hues rarely seen in museum nudes. Alice Neel’s palette is quite different in Claudia Bach Pregnant (1975), with contrasting pinks and greens representing flesh and fabric. The painter keeps the eye busy with a lively cadence of curved lines and culminating black tresses falling over the sitter’s shoulder.

There is also a strong interest in art which turn old idioms to new uses. Judith Schaechter’s stained glass works, for example, project nightmares of the contemporary urban world through the colors and graphic styles of this medieval medium. Like a cathedral window image of the baby Jesus, Child and Toy (1989) is organized according to the decorative geometry of its frame, with figures in the central space and a chain of symbolic elements on the periphery. The artist uses brilliant red and yellow glass to depict a doll-like child menaced by toys: candy and stuffed animals on the one hand, and the more adult amusements, money, drugs and guns on the other. Looking at an entirely different reality, Ann Agee uses the style of the ceramic tabletop knick-knack to commemorate a middle-class ritual in Birthing Class (2001). Colorfully dressed pregnant women listen to a demonstration by a nurse while their hipster-ish husbands look on with excessively cheerful smiles. Glints of light on the glazed surface underscore the overwrought optimism of the scene.

With the emphasis on representational work, the exhibition shows a clear bias toward the retinal and away from the conceptual. There are the occasional objects, however, that raise questions about the boundaries between art and life, image and representation. One is the 1993 painting Target by Catherine Murphy. Easily mistaken for a photograph, this bullet-ridden image brings an object into the gallery that, particularly amidst current debate over gun control, we would rather not see. It also offers a connection to the Academy’s nineteenth century collections, which include a section of tromp l’oeil painting, and a focus on the science of collecting and categorizing lived experience.

Finding other points of connection to the Academy’s historic collection will determine whether Women Artists Making their World is indeed transformative.  If the displays in the old gallery had a subtitle, it would be “Male Artists Making the World”—for the artists there, like Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, have taught us how to see. The question for me, then, is not how women artists create their own world, but how they complete our picture of what the world looks like.

One indication of how this might be done is in Female Gaze’s inclusion of works from the Chicago art milieu of the late 1960s and 1970s. This radical scene saw the participation of men and women in collectives like the Hairy Who, and spawned the careers of artists such as Nancy Spero, Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca, alongside of men like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, and Jim Nutt.  Ramberg’s painting Hereditary Uncertainty (1977), exhibited in Female Gaze, contains the jagged shapes and colors found in work by Roger Brown. Yet Ramberg’s subject, the straightjacketing of women’s bodies through clothing, is distinctly feminist. Significantly, this painting was also included in a 2012 Academy exhibit on the influence of famed Art Institute of Chicago teacher Ray Yoshida. It was displayed in the historic Furness building, only footsteps away from Thomas Eakins’ monumental surgical scene, The Gross Clinic. On that occasion, the female gaze revealed to us a way of hacking up a body that Eakins overlooked.

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If you’re prone to fits of acrophobia, the 25^th floor of the John Hancock Center may not strike you as the ideal location for an art gallery.  But staying abreast of the latest shows in Chicagoland requires precarious treks across neighborhoods, dizzying sprints up skyscrapers, and even trips across time-zones, all while maintaining your balance.  On rare occasions, it means facing your fears. Lately, several exhibitions have been worth the anxiety.

“Objects/Objectivity” at the elevated Valerie Carberry Gallery features the work of eminent octogenarians Philip Pearlstein and Ellen Lanyon. Conceived around their shared love of collecting, the show – selected by the artists themselves – examines their working relationships with the objects they accumulate.  The 12 pieces are a snug fit for Carberry’s intimate space and though both artists proceed from observation, the worlds they construct demonstrate a fundamental difference of approach.

Pearlstein’s large-scale paintings are dry, stoic affairs. The merciless cropping, irregular perspectives, and dense compositions the artist is renowned for are softened in the selections for this exhibition. But the augmented atmosphere creates a high-pressure pictorial stasis. The figures in Mickey Mouse, White House as Bird House, Male and Female Models (2001) are nearly as inanimate as the objects that surround them, and Pearlstein’s tendency to touch the surface in a one-dimensional manner further reduces an already sluggish pace. Observing the similarity between the flesh of the model in Two Nudes, Rabbit Marionette (1997) and the leather of the Eames chair upon which she rests, Pearlstein’s figure barely registers as human. While the artist’s eye may acutely perceive the objects around him, it seldom penetrates their surface.

By contrast, Ellen Lanyon’s work bristles with movement and tension. Spatial dislocations brought on by a modernist’s knack for composition provide the jolt of lightening that rouse her slumbering objects.  In Majolica Tea (2010) Lanyon fuses her props into an undulating alternative reality where subjects advance and recede, jostling for position among the pulsating greens and bitter oranges that permeate the picture plane. Compared with Pearlstein’s more sedate approach to surface, Lanyon’s Hanafuda (2010) shimmers and crackles with a dusting of iridescent paint. The dimensions of the canvases themselves – five of the six on view are squares – contribute to the reverie. When asked about the intentions behind her use of this notoriously challenging formant, the gracious Lanyon – who happened to stop by during my visit – shot me a wry smile and replied, “they were on sale.”

Just across the river in Fulton Market, Linda Warren Gallery is highlighting two distinct – but related – bodies of work by veteran painter Ed Valentine. In the main room, his large-scale paintings propose solutions to the problem of presenting street art in the environs of a gallery.  While some artists are content with importing the look of 1980s Brooklyn-style graffiti indoors – where it inevitably looks naïve – Valentine adopts the painted language of the street, its immediacy and its visceral force, while deploying it in the service of a traditional format:  the portrait. His use of the spray can delivers a wire-frame line that imparts a cartoonish appearance to Untitled Spray Portrait with Blue Painted Eye and Four Blue Drips (2011) but the caricature is undercut by audacious painterly swipes beneath the mouth and right eye. This is not to suggest that these works are easy to love, but the freshness of a painting like Untitled Spray Portrait with Painted Eye and Green Drip (2011) is undeniable.

More immediately likeable, the numerous small oils displayed along Warren’s back gallery witness the artist responding to the sheer joy and materiality of paint. In Untitled Portrait with Red-Orange and Brown Painted Eye (2011) Valentine autopsies the last 150 years of painting, tipping his hat to every major development in the modernist tradition without a hint of cynicism or irony. In addition to the strokes, spatters, and Stella-like stripes that comprise works such as Untitled Portrait with Orange Ear and Purple Drip (2011), Valentine locates his subjects in an ambiguous space that expands and contracts. These spatial alterations cause his figures to simultaneously hover along and beneath the picture plane, either dominating their environment or playing victim to it, depending on scale. Taken as a whole, the paintings’ analogous temperament  threatens to blur them together, but with time and patience the works assert their individuality, becoming a rogues’ gallery of characters that you’d swear you recognize.

2011 has yielded a bounty of quality shows around the city and two additional cases feature artists whose works on paper investigate the built environment. In River North, Amy Casey’s exceptional “Boomtown” at Zg Gallery closed in August, but an echo of the exhibition reverberates in the gallery’s office space through the end of October.  The glorious detail and individuality of the industrial buildings, homes, and urban structures that encompass pieces such as the acrylic, City Blocks (2011) make you feel as though you might actually pass them on a stroll along Euclid Avenue. Farther afield, Matthew Woodward’s monumental graphite on paper abstractions take glimpses of the urban environment as a starting point and evolve into a grayed, ethereal space. His “Tremendous Alone” exhibit, comprising an outstanding collection of drawings, is at the Elmhurst Art Museum, located just 15 miles west of the Loop. Worth the trip, if you can maintain your balance.

Philip Pearlstein and Ellen Lanyon: Objects/Objectivity at Valerie Carberry Gallery, 875. N Michigan Ave #2510. September 16 to November 5, 2011.

Ed Valentine: Untitled at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W Fulton Market #200. September 9 to October 22, 2011

Amy Casey: New Paintings & Etchings at Zg Gallery, 300 W Superior Street.  September 9 to October 29, 2011

Matthew Woodward: The Tremendous Alone at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 S. Cottage Hill Ave. Elmhurst, Il.  September 16 to December 31, 2011

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