Magdalena Abakanowicz is a contemporary sculptor renown for her groups of headless figures standing in rows and or striding as a mass, impelled by a compulsion that relates to the tragic elements of human instinct. She grew up in Poland where she experienced the chaotic violence of life during the Second World War. She first distinguished herself as a fiber artist and would later transfer a disturbing primordial organic sensibility, displayed in this earlier work, to surfaces of cast bronze. Currently she lives and works in Warsaw. Northwestern University’s Block Museum has arranged a compelling exhibit of her work, consisting mainly of Abakanowicz’s drawings created over three decades. These reveal a fascinating graphic firmament that the artist cultivated in conjunction with her sculpture.

In her drawings lines act like the ropes and woolen fiber used in her early woven pieces. These monumental drawings consist of interwoven lines made with charcoal or gouache that tangle and bind together to form strange organic beings. Forms allude to a tree trunk, a human torso, a flower, or an insect; they explore the ambivalence between nature’s capacity to produce the mysterious pulsating of life which is simultaneously haunted by the treachery of  death. This malevolent side of nature is made explicit in the work Drawing: Inside of Devious Tree (1988-1992), where the central trunk has sprouted flailing branches that embrace and devour all surrounding space on the page.

Throughout the exhibit Abakanowicz  repeats the use of egg shapes represently the swelling of a pregnant human belly, or the ovoid form of a flower or fly.  In the three drawings Body 81 A (1981), Body 82 A (1981), and Drawing from the Cycle Corps (1996) a monolithic unisex torso looks like a tree trunk, with neck and arms reaching beyond the limits of the paper like outstretched branches. Strange stirrings in its belly expand to a full pregnancy. As its title suggests the black body of Corps looks burnt and dead, even as of the intimations of life swell within it.  The Flower (1999) drawings depict black blooms that also allude to the female genitalia. Once again the human female organ that refers to the creation of life merges with a predestined tragedy and death.

Accompanying the drawings is a single installation of twelve burlap and resin figures from the artist’s Ragazzi series entitled Flock (1990).  These figures differ significantly from Abakanowicz’s massive outdoor sculpture Agora, her gift to the city of Chicago recorded in Agnes Masters documentary film that was shown in conjunction with the exhibit. Unlike the figures in Agora, these creatures do not tower or stride forward in a chaotic array of aimless aggression. They remain the headless bodies of young adolescents reaching shoulder height and standing straight with arms at their sides, like attentive cocoons in a pupal stage of development. Though more innocent and vulnerable, they seem to be doomed by fate.

The drawing series Faces Which Are Not Portraits (2004 – 2005) offers the vestige of a human face as a response to the headless figures that haunt the gallery. Egg shapes, echoed in other drawings, become phantoms of the human face. While the faces in this series reflect some of Abakanowicz’s features, they confront the viewer as depressed or terrified existential masks with hollowed eyes, sometimes expressing a deeply detached sense of withdrawal and inwardness. Their graphic power resides in the artist’s use of brusque strokes of black and white gouache that grasp at fleeting moments of intense emotion. The gestures are primitive and immediate, as though barely able to articulate and give form to the pain they bear witness to. The Faces are stark reminders that the exhibition’s title, The Reality of Dreams refers to the trauma and existential anxiety embodied by Abakanowicz’s life experiences and her disturbingly unforgettable symbols of the human condition.

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The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL   60208
(847) 491-4000

April 17 – June 18   2006

Jim Dine’s  art –  his emblematic hearts, bathrobes, tools, and paintbrushes – is typically associated with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.  The Block Museum’s exhibition of monumental drawings has a very different story to tell, taking its cue from the artist’s remarkable self-reinvention as a draughtsman of the human figure and portrait beginning in the 1970s.  Most of these unsettlingly expressive works are fraught with  dark intensity,  giving vent to a range of emotions.  “Anger is part of my medium,” said Dine. “I like to walk alongside of it.”

The drawings impress with both their large scale and expressive line.  In some drawings the layers of charcoal are so densely erased and reworked they resemble ash left from some kind of immolation, an elegaic residue of intense emotional combustion.  This is particularly apparent in Dine’s self-portrait series Looking in the Dark and his 1996 portrait Nancy.  These darkened faces have eyes that are full of hard intensity, frozen into expressions of accusation, anger, or wild anxiety.  This same mood is reflected in drawings of sculptures from antiquity such as Homer and Socrates (1989).  The face of Socrates on the top of the drawing is a mask of hard black stone, open-eyed, impenetrable and defiant.  The portrait of Homer just below reflects the opposite mood: the blind poet’s eyes are closed while his face is rendered with a smoky softness that is inward, ghostly, and vulnerable.

This same inarticulate fragility appears in the drawing A Variation of Jessie Learning Things from a Man (1976).  A woman looks over her shoulder to a man seated next her.  Her face is defined by deep shadows whereas the man’s face is practically erased: his tightly closed eyes hold some impenetrable secret.  In Fading Away(1993) the face of a female cat gently holds the chin of her male monkey companion whose face has become a mass of erased charcoal dust.  In both images the female counterparts seem to be the sympathetic witnesses of their partner’s unspeakable melancholy and dissolution.

A number of works feature hearts, trees, skulls, owls, and plants which resonate as comparisons with the human figure and anatomy.  In Drawing from Van GoghII(1983) a frightening tree trunk with breast-like tumors and short clawing branches draws an association with the female figure.  In Study for the Venus in Black and Grey (1983), a voluptuous sculpture from antiquity has  transformed into a monstrous mass of black chiseled rock.  This same Venus is present in a panel from Childhood (First Version) (1989), except the softer arms and head of a woman have been added, completing the figure.  This powerful six-panel piece has other female figures which link her naked body to erotic desire and death symbolized by the image of a skull.  Dine’s unforgettable 1976 drawing A Study From Blake places the skull directly on the body of his nude female subject.  Other works such as Hair (1970) and depictions of plants such as orchids in Mid-Summer, Paris (2002) imply female genitalia.  Plant life becomes erotic, imbued with a mysterious and soft tactility.

Several works are haunted by the brooding presence of skulls that appear in combination with many of Dine’s past themes.  When Dine’s insignia hearts appear with skulls they set up an intense symbolic tension between love and death.  The skull makes a mockery of Dine’s brightly colored Pop Art bathrobe in the drawingDancer (1997).  A skeleton wearing a blue bathrobe has his arms outstretched as if caught spinning in the middle of a dance.  The most moving depiction of a skull is in the drawing Walking With Me (1997) showing the skeleton in a suit carrying a Pinocchio doll on his back.  Here is the artist’s symbol of pop optimism, youth, and innocence merged with existential death.  The contrast creates a powerful synthesis of Dine’s past and present themes,  becoming a poignant reminder of the fragility and brevity of human existence.

Questions of suffering and melancholy abound in images of sculptures from antiquity.  Many of these corroded visages ask age-old questions through their solemn silence.  The Portrait Bust of the Emperor Trajan (1989) seems rueful with disgust as he looks imperiously out of blank stone eyes.  Large Drawing of a Small Statue (1978) shows an Egyptian pharaoh bearing an ashen expression of wounded sadness.  Study For Europe (1987) depicts a wide-eyed female portrait reminiscent of painted Roman tomb masks.  Her closed mouth seems pregnant with tragic words that cannot be said: only her large glinting eyes seem to speak over the silence of ages.

In retrospect Dine’s Pop Art work did not reflect the true emotional identity he sought to develop and of which he was capable.  Though this earlier work served the purpose of garnering him art world attention it was only a prelude to the artist’s development as a draughtsman with a deeper expressive purpose in the human subject.  Dine hit his stride when he confronted sexuality and death as the major themes of his work.   The Block Museum exhibit shows Dine flourishing in the realm of life’s deeper and darker mysteries, looking to the art of antiquity, its Eros andThanatos, as a meditation on time, desire, and human suffering.

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