National Academy: February 4 to May 8, 2016
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City,  (212) 369-4880

Firestone: February 4 to March 6, 2016
4 Great Jones Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street
New York City, (917) 324-3386

In 1972, the year that Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were creating Womanhouse with their students at Cal Arts, my older cousin Annie taught me a game called Masculine/Feminine. Two players would alternate, pointing to an object and asking, “Masculine, or feminine?” Telephone, driveway, rec-room: masculine. Paint brush, river, rhinestone: feminine. This game was a lot of fun, but it was also strange, because, as a ten-year-old kid, I couldn’t understand why things would have a gender. Two concurrent exhibitions of the work of Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) in New York have me playing this game all over again. As I stand in front of her iconic Dollhouse (1972), on view at the National Academy Museum, I think about the broader impact of Schapiro’s legacy, as well as the new knowledge that we can acquire by focusing on a distinct period in the work of this luminary of feminist art.

Miriam Schapiro: The California Years, 1967-1975 inaugurates the Eric Firestone Loft at 4 Great Jones Street, a fourth-floor walk-up that is redolent with the histories of artists including Walter De Maria, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, who once had studios nearby. Firestone now handles the Schapiro estate, and his commitment to scholarly research is commendable. Installed within a long, whitewashed space flooded with winter light, this tightly curated exhibition provides a view onto a lesser-known body of Schapiro’s work, created during an eight-year period when the artist was living on the West Coast. The Firestone show establishes a connective thread from Schapiro’s Abstract Expressionist works, to the “shrines” of the early 1960s, to the geometric abstractions, to the femmage works that are on view uptown, in a concentrated if modest survey curated by Maura Reilly at the National Academy Museum.

By the time Schapiro arrived in California in 1967 with her husband, the painter Paul Brach, she was already a successful New York artist. She had attended meetings at the Eighth Street Club (where, like the other few women in attendance, she never spoke up) and was friends with artists such as Jack Tworkov, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, and John Gruen. During the 1950s she exhibited at the Tanager and Stable Galleries before joining André Emmerich, one of the rare serious galleries to include women in his stable, where she showed regularly from 1958 to 1976.

The heroic scale and gestural reach of her paintings in the 1950s demonstrate Schapiro’s ambition to be reckoned with alongside the Ab-Ex big boys. Two works in the National Academy exhibition, Fanfare (1958) and Façade (1959), exemplify Schapiro’s engagement with the ideas of her generation and antecedents (Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mitchell). However technically accomplished, these paintings feel derivative; they demonstrate what Paul Brach (including his own work) meant when he wrote “Perhaps our generation was starting to realize that we had inherited a successful revolution,” and that “Our gestural abstractions came too easily. They needed some resistance. In Mimi’s case it was geometry.” In 1962, Schapiro began a series of “shrine” paintings with stacked compartments that contained icons of the studio and femininity (paint tubes: masculine, egg: feminine). The shrines remind me of Medieval altarpieces with their classical arches and precious metals, just as they reference the artist’s painful quest for a unified identity, and self-acceptance as a woman and an artist. The cool purity of Silver Windows (1967), with its mitered grid lays down the rules of the game for the geometric works to follow.

In 1967 Mimi and Paul moved to California where he became chair of the art department at the University of California San Diego. When they arrived, the man who had promised a position for Mimi told him that there was none. Paul threatened to break his contract, and a lecturer position was found for Mimi. Working with David Nabilof, a young physicist at the university, Schapiro was able to manipulate and transform her geometric drawings. She harnessed the new technology to try new compositional variations after painting Big Ox (1967) on view at the National Academy.

Composed of four enormous truss-like “limbs” intersecting a central, open octagon, Big Ox, and its companion painting Side Ox (at Firestone) are realized in electric hues of cadmium orange, silver, and pink acrylic paint so saturated that these paintings have an almost sonic impact, like a jackhammer pulverizing concrete. Schapiro’s radical pinks— from the rosy hues of Giovanni Sassetta’s altarpieces to the intestinal color of Pepto Bismol—were all about secrets and private places. This work also looks like a direct response to Ronald Bladen’s X, (1967), a monumental aluminum sculpture that had been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery that year.

The Ox paintings became icons of female power, eventually claimed by Schapiro and Judy Chicago (her partner in founding the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts) as the first example of “central core imagery.” While in 1968 she explained that Big Ox was inspired “by the thought of a large, imposing sense of landscape coming toward the viewer and inviting him to become part of it, Schapiro later described it as her “explicit cunt painting (that) was a real cry in the darkness…for something besides the symbol of the phallus.” Indeed, for many early feminist artists geometric abstraction was a formal device for encoding the ideas of a female aesthetic domain that would eventually challenge the hegemony of a male-dominated art world.

In California, the slick surfaces associated with industrial fabrication, spray painting techniques, automotive lacquers, and plastics were very much in vogue among the artists associated with Finish-Fetish and Light and Space who placed a West Coast stamp on East Coast minimalism. But Schapiro, who could see the Pacific Ocean from her rented La Jolla house, was inspired by the light and water of her adopted environment. Keyhole, whose monumental, synthetic “body” projects like an industrial piston into the viewer’s space, also floats on a vapor-sprayed ground that could equally be a sky from Tiepolo or Venice Beach.

By 1972, when she created Dollhouse (installed within Womanhouse) in collaboration with artist Sherry Brody, Schapiro had redefined collage as femmage, establishing a continuity between high art collage and works made by anonymous women using traditional craft materials. In their playfully illustrated essay “Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled,” a classic feminist text that was first published in the magazine Heresies, Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer laid out historic precedents and criteria for femmage. As Meyer remembers it, during a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft, Mimi had a phone call with the art critic Grace Glueck and together they coined the term “femmage.”

Reflecting this deepening interest in domestic materials, Flying Carpet (1972), at Eric Firestone, reveals the fragment of a staircase seen through a tear in a tilted rectangle (carpet). This transitional work includes bits and pieces of Japanese paper and calico-patterned wallpapers and fabrics that break through the painting’s interior boundaries. With its allusion to Middle-Eastern textiles and myth, Schapiro must have been charged up about the fact that she was finding a way to move beyond the pure, hard-edged abstractions by way of materials that were cut, torn, frayed and literally pliable.

From the mid to late 1970s, Schapiro was a leader of Pattern and Decoration movement. Coming to a variety of conclusions in their own work, these artists were nevertheless unified by the consciousness-raising dialogues of the Women’s Movement as well as a shared interest in the ornament and decorative arts traditions (especially ceramics, textiles, and gardens, and architecture) from around the world.

Schapiro’s dedication to forging an artistic language that would recast women’s work, along with the varied phases of her production, has yielded a rich inheritance. Look at Carrie Moyer’s poured and stenciled paintings, the arena for what she describes an “erotics of craft,” or Mickalene Thomas’s explorations of female erotic power and mind-bending domestic interiors that incorporate (gender-indeterminate) rhinestones, copper pots, animal prints, and fake wood paneling. Consciously or not, these artists channel Schapiro who can be thought of as their enabling Athena.

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In 1977 Nina Yankowitz suggested I attend a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft for a preliminary discussion about the fourth issue of the Heresies Collective entitled Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics. We sat around in a circle and each of us was asked to speak about what she was interested in. When it came time for me to speak, I said nervously with my little, low voice, “I’m interested in why so many women made collages.” At the end of the meeting Miriam Schapiro came up to me and said, “I want to work with you on that.” I thought, “Oh my God she is going to swallow me up — this strong, forceful woman!” But actually at some later point in our collaboration, she said to me “Melissa, do you think you could keep quiet for a minute so I could get a word in?” During one of our meetings, Mimi had a phone call with Grace Glueck and they came up with the name, “Femmage.”

I feel lucky to have met Mimi. At the time, collaborating with an older artist was important for me, while she also appreciated and benefitted from my perspective. We had a lot of fun as we worked on our research and writing, and her energy and committed work ethic was contagious. It was a wonderful moment for both of us, personally and professionally. I am happy that I could participate in conceptualizing and developing ideas that would remain valuable to Mimi and to myself. That “Femmage” has been anthologized and is still relevant to students and artists is a testimony and lasting memory to the art and character of Miriam Schapiro, as it is to the groundbreaking and exciting context in which we wrote it.  MELISSA MEYER

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January 9 to February 15, 2014
514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

As a vehicle for combining color and light there is no better material means in painting than watercolor. Its properties are well documented, though that doesn’t diminish, in the right hands, its capacity to surprise. Willem de Kooning was well-acquainted with its particular qualities, valuing both its sublety and its capacity for directness; the medium fit well with his desire for a spontaneity capable of conflating lived life and studio practice. It seems this is something equally appealing to Melissa Meyer who has achieved it , arguably, without the associated drama of abstract expressionist ways. While choosing to pass on that generation’s angst, Meyer continues a tradition of abstraction without foregrounding personal struggle–which isn’t to say she in any way takes it easy. As Mary Heilmann said of her own work, there is no need to “Duke it out” with paintings as Ab-Ex artists once appeared to do. The difficulties and challenges of painting are not eschewed, as they are not necessarily a correlative of a combative or risk-filled life. As Larry Poons said, risks are better taken in painting than when crossing the road.

This exhibition, Meyer’s third at Lennon, Weinberg, makes the best possible use of a relatively narrow space that affords views of considerable distance from front to back. Groups of works encompass a range of temperature from black and white works on paper made in 2012, through paintings like Little Smokey, 2013,  that evince a relatively austere range of color, to the painting Shuffle, 2013 which is warm and expansive. Little Smokey, 2013, is a horizontal diptych whose lateral emphasis recalls the proportions of Cinemascope, an apposite association in view of the artist’s long-standing interest in cinema.  The bluish-black and violet brushed tracks have a calligraphic quality, but they are not writing per se or distinct pictograms, and describe a dry melt of turns and curves that speed up and slow down in bursts. Their episodic yet linked characteristics enfold an idea of the uneven flow of time rather as cinema can vary pace through editing. These separate yet always active passages imply and dismantle an idea of the grid using askew rectangular sections that establish an irregular and constantly changing pulse. The saturated or pale yellow, pink and off white areas join the energized armature in leaving only brief pauses for the eye to halt until continuing helter-skelter (think also of the Beatles song of the same name). Chinese landscape painting and the sculptures of David Smith both come to mind, though here any comparisons are made with the understanding that a thorough reinvention has taken place.  The changes of illumination and contrast made possible by the under-painting pull  what might otherwise be be a very frontal composition into a torqued, flickering, pulsing  set of loosely-defined  spaces that recalls the coexistence of disparate spaces and scale changes in Chinese 18th-century painting.

There are three paintings that share the same chromatic range as Little Smokey and are placed in the same area of the gallery that nonetheless diverge in subtle, exploratory ways. In the larger Smokey, (2013) the change in scale of the mosaic of compartments and the reduced contrast as well as the blurring through washed color implies changes of focus amidst a sweeping, undulating pattern of light. Meyer achieves contrast from one painting to the other though shifts in color and structure, ever mindful of the potential of discordant and disjunctive means. These means, nevertheless, unexpectedly cohere whilst not submitting to stasis.  In Devlin, (2013) for example, a painting of contrasting lushly warm and sharply cool colors, there is no predictable sequence yet overlapping and always extending riffs somehow don’t fall apart thanks to an implied melody.

With Meyer, drawing and painting play an equal role in generating her linear element – and she cannot be accused of forsaking either in not separating them. An arabesque can remain just that or it can thicken and double to become a shape. Other times areas of color are drawn over or partially cancelled out, the choice constantly varying. When it comes to her consideration of composition, spontaneity would appear to win out over structure because the hand is ahead of thought.  But there is no attendant loss of control as experience clearly informs the hand as much as it does thought. A painting always happens over a period of time: it is a time-based medium after all, a fact of which Meyer’s approach makes a virtue by repeatedly elapsing one painterly moment or relationship into the next, simultaneously exposing the process and allowing it to run backwards and forwards for the viewer. There is always discovery in Meyer’s paintings, even when there are clear horizons to head towards.

This article was updated February 14.  The exhibition under review was the artist’s third at Lennon, Weinberg, not her second as previously stated.

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December 14, 2006 to February 3, 2007

traveling to the Wiegand Gallery of Notre Dame of Namur University
January 20 to March 3, 2008

What is it to exhibit the black and white works on paper of Melissa Meyer made between 1984 and 1994? What is it to momentarily gather and present this work apart from the current color-rich, exuberant, work that the artist is known for? And what are it to do so when these works were initially adjacent to but not the main body of work at that time? Among many possible answers, one is that in doing so, viewers are shown something akin to the back-story; the back-stage efforts, investigations and private discoveries that Meyer was engaged in. Some of these discoveries have been transformed and reappear in the current work.

These varied works show the many formal possibilities at Meyer’s disposal. It is tempting to try to identify parts of the language such as calligraphic lines and luminous scrims of paint that we see in her work to date and to anticipate which of those possibilities might resurface in future works. And we see that these discoveries have as much to do with form as they do with color.

Many of the works on view are drawings done in charcoal or oil stick on paper and read as exploratory efforts while some monumentally scaled pieces, made in oil or oil stick on paper, are robust statements. A range of compositions and image types signal the influence of past masters such as, Matisse, De Kooning, Pollock, yet ,each have information reflecting this artist’s searching and critical process that was underway at the time. The work registers influence or influence is noted but only in the way that is analogous, for example, to the way we think see a masked face in a cloud one second that shifts into a belly dancer the next. InUntitled, Triptych #2, 1988 and Triptych#2 VSC 1992, there is a familiarity to the high contrast, cut-out-like positive–negative interlocking forms, but as we follow the forms we discover the image resists being locked into simple association. It seems to change as we view it or is it we who change as we view it?

These works evolved as a secondary part of her practice. They were made concurrently with colorful paintings that she was developing for exhibitions at the time. Meyer has remarked, “After working in watercolor and oil, in the end I would do something in black and white to check the tonality and activity of the forms to see if they had strength.” In an untitled drawing in oil stick done in 1986, Meyer has brought several types of marks and speed to bear on the surface. A swoop of calligraphic line falls from the top left of the page and stops just short of a ghost-like, grayish vertical form that is partially covered by a solid black bug-like form made with thick, forceful strokes. In this piece one can see the antecedents of Meyers horizontal-vertical rhythm, positive-negative shape-making, decentered composition, calligraphic line and veils of color; characteristic elements of the artists work today. In this case the attitude and aim of Meyer’s abstraction seems to have more in common with her contemporary peer, Bill Jensen, than with those of earlier generations. In this drawing there is a range of force, variety of stroke, and ambiguity of scale which together hint at a notion of time, distance and continuity to suggests a view that is at once cosmic and microscopic.

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“Andrea Belag: New Paintings” and “White: A Group Show”, curated by Andrea Belag, at Bill Maynes Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York (between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 741 3318) through November 15

The latest show of Melissa Meyer at Elizabeth Harris represents one of America’s leading painters at the very top of her form. As a lyrical abstractionist the only artists to approach her in verve and inventiveness that I’m aware of are Brice Marden and Howard Hodgkin.

If this statement seems hyperbolic, first ask the question, who actually is painting lyrical abstraction these days? Thomas Nozkowski and Sean Scully are leaders in the reinvention of abstraction, but neither can really be called lyricists (the one because of his problematics, the other his operatics). The colorful doodles of Jonathan Lasker and the muddy doodles of Terry Winters are too mired in postmodern posture to be taken seriously as ends in themselves, which is arguably a prerequisite for genuine painterly lyricism.

Historically, it is extraordinary how few painters really took up the challenge of Jackson Pollock. His rival for leadership of the New York School, Willem de Kooning, had countless imitators and acolytes, and to this day some kind of fusion of abstraction and figuration remains the most compelling option for most painters still drawn to modernism. Pollock’s influence, however, was in a way more radical: his gestural abstraction propelled artists away from painting, towards performance and new media.

Most Second Generation New York School painters chased the dragon of color in the direction of field over and above line. In the short term, this led to intense chromatic explorations; in the long term, however, flat, hard-edges drew painting into iconic, conceptual avenues. Or else protagonists like Jules Olitski or Helen Frankenthaler withdrew into romantic pictorialism.

It is a calligraphic melding of line and color that truly conveys the lyrical impulse. Ms. Meyer’s painting entails an almost alchemical marriage of figure and ground; more specifically, in her case, of gesture and bleed. Her work of the last twenty years reconnects with an earlier impulse in American painting. One forebear she brings to mind in her fusion of line and space is Sam Francis. Like this overlooked postwar master, she is an epicurean rather than a hedonist: jouissance and agility are never gratuitous ends in themselves.

At first it might seem business as usual with Ms. Meyer’s newest show of nine canvases, with the familiar vocubulary of diaphanous stains and bravura flourishes. But actually there’s been an exponential leap in the development of her syntax. Earlier in her career, Ms Meyer reinvented herself as an oil painter when she discovered watercolor. There is no mistaking the influence of this medium to this day, in the speed, spontaneity, and ethereality of her paint handling. As profound a shake-up has recently occurred in her very public education as an artist, but this time there is no visual clue as to the protagonist: Photoshop.

Last winter, two mammoth murals as much as forty foot high and sixty wide were unveiled in the atrium of Tokyo’s tallest building, the Shiodome City Center. Preparing maquettes for this project on a computer renewed her engagement with collage. This, not to mention actually executing the murals, has profoundly affected her sense of space and her attraction to radical discontinuity.

The grid has for long been a mainstay of Ms. Meyer’s sense of composition, and paintings can still resemble happy go lucky quilts. But there is a new looseness, a liberal improvisation with structure, evident in works like the 10-foot-wide diptych, “Duetto,” (2003). This is an exhilarating duet between open and closed forms, between lasso-like calligraphy, and dense, blob like hieroglyphs. Shaped blocks of smooth color form a kind of basso continuo.

Such musical analogies come felicitously when looking at Ms. Meyer. She has a rare capacity to be at once harmonious and performative, in that everything is exactly and inevitably where it should be, and yet is full of surprise.

Photoshop and the Tokyo murals have been for Ms. Meyer what cutout and the Vence Chapel commission were for Matisse: a surprising new twist in the education of an artist “ever a beginner” in the Rilkean sense.

Andrea Belag has developed a highly personal painting idiom that has something of the formal capacity of a sonnet in its discipline, severity, and expressive potential. She is showing at Bill Maynes, two floors up from Elizabeth Harris. Her work is charged with an intensity that suggests the kind of expansive imagination that thrives within reduced means.

A typical work is usually around 3 feet on its longest side, constructed of rectangles within rectangles, brushy bars of muted color. Her format very closely resembles that of Mr. Hodgkin in the way it rather literally presents an Albertian window onto the world. Like the Englishman, she seems to encourage subtle intimations of landscape and narrative. She shares with Ms. Meyera watercolor senseibility within oil paint, and with Mr. Scully a willingness to make emphatic brushstrokes lead players in her painterly dramas, at once literal and metaphorical presences.

Her paintings have a voice of their own, however, and a welcome voice it is, tough and quirky. In terms of color, she is more tonal than chromatic, and she has a correspondingly prodigious range of textures, from the loose, open, and squiggy to the grainy, gritty, and dense. At times these can seem solipsistic, a little too pleased with their own range, but the contrastive
character of her brushstroke-bars often carry the narrative. And her work always remains charged with an ³as if² quality. Her ambiguous forms nervously teeter on the edge of cognition. They can be correspondingly edgy in mood.

In Mr. Maynes’s project room, Ms. Belag has curated ‘White,’ a cute thematic show which in its studied eclecticism seems calculated to distance the artist’s own formal preoccupations from any accusation of formalism. A number of conceptual exhibits just happen to be white; there’s a rather fascinating Dorothea Rockburne on plain paper (but does that really count as
white?), and a politically heavy-handed white panel by the new enfant terrible of racial abjection, William Pope L. The show badly needed a Robert Ryman, but the wayward effort was nonetheless redeemed by the inclusion of an utterly exquisite window painting by Lois Dodd from 1983. The compelling focus and intensity of this realist painting raised the bar for Ms. Belag¹s own efforts.

A shortened version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, October 30, 2003

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Melissa Meyer is big in Japan. Not in the euphemistic sense applied to rock stars, but literally. She has just completed her largest paintings to date there.

Tokyo’s newest skyscraper, the Shiodome City Center, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates, is also, at 43 floors, the tallest. Ms. Meyer has created a pair of murals for the atrium, one at 10′ high and 60′ long, the other at 40′ x 40′. The atrium also includes works by fellow New Yorker Matthew Ritchie, and an artist from Beijing, Zhan Wang.

Like all her works, the murals are a riot of color, spontaneity, exuberant gesture, and masterful poise. In terms of color, gesture and mood, Ms. Meyer is one of the most upbeat painters working in New York today. Whatever the state of the economy, business folk entering the complex are sure to feel a lifting of spirits on passing these works. It is interesting that these murals, decorating a major new skyscraper, started life a week before September 11.

Ms. Meyer tells the story in her Tribeca loft, looking out a window that used to frame a view of the Twin Towers. When the attacks occurred, she was “sitting right here, where we are now, and watching from this window.”

“The week before September 11 (now we do everything “before” and “after”) Sarina Tang [an art consultant] asked me for some slides because she had a project. Then September 11 happened, and Sarina called again and said, ‘Now you have to do a proposal.’ I felt very lucky because it was very comforting to be able to focus on something. I had a lot of trouble focusing on my painting.”

Ms. Meyer threw herself into the technicalities of making a proposal. She called friends for advice, and fellow painter Joyce Kozloff said, “You’re asking all the right questions”. She was told to go along to Cooper Union and ask the architects there to make her a model.

“But I thought, I don’t want to make a model, because I don’t like the little paintings you have to make for models, and then it turned out there was a program all the architects have on their computers. In the end, it turned out, I couldn’t have done this project without a computer, a cell phone, and a digital camera, which is funny considering I’m a traditional abstract oil painter.”

This observations describes Melissa Meyer perfectly. She is her own woman, but open to change. A tough nut, but flexible. She was born in Queens in 1947 and has the accent and attitude to prove it.

The architect Wendy Evans Joseph, who designed the Women’s Museum in Dallas, let her work with a technician in her office out in Brooklyn. “I scanned in my paintings and watercolors, stood behind Liz, and said, can you move it over here, can you make it transparent, soften the edges, take it from this painting or that painting? Basically I made a mosaic, or a collage, on the computer to fit into the two spaces.”

Ms. Meyer noticed that the paintings she was proposing for the Shiodome Center were going to be too big to hang like conventional canvases on a wall. “This is something I learned from my experience living in Rome 20 years ago in the American Academy. And I thought, since they are building the building, why can’t they be set in. It’s worth asking. The world’s coming to an end anyway, so I can take my chances. Of course, the architects loved it. It made sense and they saved a lot of granite!”

The final murals took their forms from these proposals, worked up in Photoshop from an almost arbitrary selection of images chosen originally just to give a mock-up of what a Melissa Meyer might look like. This might seem a curious genesis, but it actually, ties into Ms. Meyer view of collage. “I think collage was the most important visual contribution to 20th-century art.”

Does she make collages herself? “Not any more. I did about 20 years ago.” Perhaps she has internalized the technique, so it continues to inform her painting? “Yes, but I think we all have, just by looking at websites. Going to Tokyo, looking at what looked like a whole city of Times Square, that’s collage. Book jackets. All these things we see all the time are a collage space. We live in a collage space.”

Her paintings often bring to mind quilts, in the way they patch together discrete areas, often forming a loose grid of irregular rectangles of color and calligraphy. “Its funny because in my case I knew about Kurt Schwitters,” she says, referring to the Dada pioneer of collage, “before I knew quilts.” So you are not directly influenced by quilts? “I’m influenced by everything that I think is beautiful,” she bounces back. “I love Japanese prints, Ukiyo’e prints which are woodcuts with water based ink. I like the way the space is created without foreground, middleground, background, but all happening at once.”

But Meyer’s interest in collage is not purely formal. Back in the 1970s she co-authored with artist Miriam Schapiro a polemical feminist text they titled “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled-FEMMAGE.” The artists argued that many of the breakthroughs of the (predominantly male) modernist pioneers like collage, assemblage, photomontage, the paper cut-out, had been anticipated quietly and unofficially by women in ages past in such activities as sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, cooking, and the like, which the authors called “femmage.”

Ms. Meyer’s particular obsession was with the scrapbook. “I had collected scrapbooks, which I had considered visual diaries. I had an English one I bought on Portobello Road. I knew about this woman by just looking at her visual diary, this scrap book.”

The scrapbook is a perfect metaphor for Meyer’s painting: an inexplicable natural order arises from a piecing together of disparate parts. A jumble coheres, but without any imposed narrative or logical sequence. High-octane color and decentered compositions give her work unique strength and beauty. But they also open her up to charges that she violates one of the taboos of current art orthodoxy: That is, that she is decorative.

For many years, Ms. Meyer was represented by the late Holly Solomon, whose gallery was best known for a group (to which Ms. Meyer did not belong) called “Pattern and Decoration.” But what do people mean by “decorative” anyway? “It depends who is saying it, but it could mean in the worse sense, meaningless, or too pretty, or too beautiful, or they don’t think. Its just some word they use that maybe they can’t come up with something better, or they don’t have the energy to work out what they are actually looking at.”

“I don’t mind the word ‘decorative’ if it is used in relationship to Matisse,” she adds. Is there a word she would use to describe the essence of her work? “I think spirit. Or Spiritus, which is breath. I think the best criticism I ever got was from my mother when she saw this painting of mine at the Metropolitan Museum. She walked up, didn’t say anything, and then walked back and said, ‘So much life.'” That’s a lovely thing to hear from anybody, especially the person who gave you life.”

One of the smartest things a teacher ever said to me is that the quality in your work people initially reject you for eventually is what they want. That’s kind of brilliant, no? I used that line a lot at Skowhegan, and people went, ‘Ooooh.'”

What’s Skowhegan? “I don’t know if they’ll resent this quote – but it is an elite art camp. 1250 people apply, 65 are invited, mostly on scholarship, on a 300-acre compound, on a lake.” Ms. Meyer spent last summer there, critiquing young painters and working on one of the Tokyo murals. The other (the 40-foot square piece) was completed in a massive factory building in Queens where she could only work two-panels deep at a time. Ms. Meyer is an interesting mix of individualist and social animal. She thrives in artist communities. She is on the board, for instance, at Yaddo, the artists and writers retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, and is a frequent resident there.

Ms. Meyer’s mood combines the fatalistic and the optimistic in a very New York Jewish kind of way. At the end of the recorded interview, she mused: “In my most negative moments, when I think that all of this [looking at her stacks of painting] is going to be destroyed, I think this project in Tokyo will be the only proof that I was here. Those are my most negative thoughts.” But then she reproaches herself. “But I don’t want to end on such a gloomy note.” And then, pointing at the tape recorder, she realizes her dark thoughts need not be the ending: “But this is a collage anyway.”

A version of this article was first published in the New York Sun in April 2003 under the title “Big in Japan: A Chat with the Painter”

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