The recent exhibition at Gallery 16 in SF of work by Inez Storer and her late husband Andrew Romanoff presented a touching and bittersweet journey through time and place. Titled Allow Nothing to Worry You, the show pairs Storer’s unique brand of Magic Realism with Romanoff’s quirky and whimsical works.
A larger-than-life photograph of the pair greets viewers upon arrival, a mural-sized enlargement of a scene at the couple’s bucolic home in Inverness. Romanoff, a dashing figure in a striped shirt and ascot, is on the right, while Storer, an intense and vibrant figure on the left crackles with energy. But the punctuation point is where their hands are gently joined in a tender clasp.
Storer is the more sophisticated artist of the pair. Her formal art education included studies at Art Center Los Angeles, San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, Dominican University, and SF State, where she obtained her master’s degree. She taught art at SFAI for many years, as well as at Sonoma State, SF State, College of Marin, and numerous other colleges and art schools. She also ran the Lester Gallery in Inverness, while teaching and raising a blended family of six kids.
Allow Nothing to Worry You Installation Shot all photos courtesy Gallery 16
Storer’s work pairs an unerring eye for color and composition with a wicked sense of humor, filtered through a lens of social and political conscience. Drawing strongly on narratives inspired by found objects, iconic subject matter often includes romantic female imagery, Matisse-inspired flowers and still life objects, references to world politics, and environmental issues. With such a busy life and household, the fluidity of the collage medium enabled Storer to create her art when the opportunity presented itself.
Romanoff’s personal history has a strong intersection with that of modern civilization, as great nephew of Tsar Nicholas II, deposed and executed by Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, one might say in his case “the personal is political” is proven true in spades. He grew up in Great Britain, on the grounds of Windsor Castle, in a place with the beguiling name of “Frogmore.” While not allowed to consort with the royals, they did occasionally bump into each other in the garden. After serving in the British Navy in WWII, as a young man, Romanoff moved to the States at the encouragement of his cousin, he subsequently had to learn to fend for himself using his wits and his strength to get by.
Andrew Romanoff, New Boy at School, Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 5.5″ x 6.75”
Inez and Andrew met and fell in love, introduced by the cousin, Igor, who lived in West Marin, and the rest is history. They raised a large blended family in Inverness. Andrew discovered his own artistic talents, and became focused on the medium of Shrinky Dinks®, a children’s craft material that reduces in size when baked in the toaster oven, one which seemed somehow well-suited to convey his unique memories and impressions of the world around him. The company provided him with a lifetime supply. (More information on Andrew’s life and work is found on this site at Remembering Andrew Romanoff.)
Inez Storer, Telepathy, 2023, Mixed media on panel , 24” x 36”
Storer had grown up in Los Angeles, with her father, who worked in the film industry, offering her a look at the backlot and underbelly of the glittering fantasies of the silver screen. Forties era films, with their glamorous women, suave men, and convoluted plots, inflect much of the aesthetic of the work. Her multi-faceted dad was also a pilot, and his international adventures add another layer of complexity to the work. Even more significant was Storer’s discovery, as an adult, that she was not, in fact, Catholic, as she had been led to believe. During a time when it was dangerous to admit, her family had hidden its Jewish faith from even its own members.
Inez Storer, The Ordinary Life of Natalia Ortiz, 2010, Oil paint and collage on panel 52” × 40”
The Ordinary Life of Natalia Ortiz (2010) makes a statement about the lives of all women, how behind the calm facade of a “normal” woman’s life there are always buried secrets, hidden intrigues, loves lost or found. A box of letters, purloined from her neighbor’s garage, set the stage for a narrative about one of these clandestine affairs, their flowing script sets up a lovely collage element on the lower edge of the canvas. A beautiful, mysterious woman stands in for Natalia, while her elusive suitor emerges from the upper edge of the canvas. A bit of detective work yields the result that a woman named Natalia Ortiz was, in fact, a 40s-era film star from Mexico.
Andrew Romanoff, A Day at the Races, 2004, Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 9.5” x 9.5”
A Day at the Races (2004) suggests one of Romanoff’s iconic scenes from childhood. Here, a young lad in a stroller implores his father to push him faster, echoing the racetrack scene behind him. Scenes from Andrew’s own childhood, many included in the book The Boy Who Would be Tsar, published by Gallery 16 in 2006, have a particular poignancy that is well-suited to his chosen medium of Shrinky Dinks®. In other images, like 9 Second Limit No-Ogling Law (1995), the childlike drawing in juxtaposition with a mature theme feels more loaded; as Storer remarked, “Andrew had no filters.”
Andrew Romanoff, No Ogling, 1995 Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 10.5” x 10.5”
The mingling of romance, intrigue, royalty, Hollywood movies, Pop art, and naive art blend and intermix to create a fantastic world of illusion firmly grounded in reality and personal narrative. Like many great celebrity pairs, say Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the duo brought out the best in each other; obviously Storer, a strong-minded woman, is no femme fatale, and Romanoff, who worked as a laborer and craftsperson much of his life, had a nuanced presentation. But, yes, he exuded a royal presence, and the pair together created a gestalt of grit and grace that was unstoppable. It seems as if their symbiosis shifted back and forth as needed, with one providing a rudder of stability when the other began to veer off course.
While Romanoff’s work remained largely a hidden talent outside of the Bay Area, Storer’s work has been widely acclaimed. They enjoyed traveling, in particular making several memorable trips to Russia, where Andrew was greeted by many as the sole surviving heir to the monarchy traveling incognito. Storer completed a remarkable series after one trip, conflating experiences of the thin veneer of normalcy and elegance being at the time displayed in certain settings—the Russian palaces they toured—and her early assimilation of the concept that the glamour of Hollywood was really all just paste.
Gallery 16’s presentation is a welcome tribute to the amazing lives and work of these two remarkable individuals. Romanoff passed away in 2021 at the age of 98, but Storer remains vibrant and active to this day. At Storer’s talk with Griff Williams near the end of the exhibition’s run, she commented that it was good Andrew had not lived to see Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, while the pair both feared such an eventual outcome, it would have made it no easier to take. With dry humor and unfailing deftness, each in their own way has made an indelible mark on the Bay Area art scene.
Barbara Morris
Allow Nothing to Worry You closed in May at Gallery 16, SF.
Joan Brown and her dog Bob, 1961; collection of the Estate of Joan Brown; photo: Glen Cheriton/Impart Photography; courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
If any artist stands as testimony to the possibility of reincarnation, it is surely Joan Brown, who rose from the ashes of her former self at times in alignment with adopting a new painting style, or finding a new husband—occurrences which happened simultaneously on several occasions. SFMOMA has mounted an ambitious retrospective featuring a generous offering of the artist’s works. Curated by Janet Bishop and Nancy Lim, respectively chief and associate curators of painting and sculpture at the museum, the selections include work from her student years at CSFA up through works she completed close to her untimely death in 1990.
Joan Brown (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Katherine Du Tiel
Entering the exhibition, the viewer is surrounded by her thickly-impastoed early works. Brown was a student at the California School of Fine Arts, later known as San Francisco Art Institute, from 1955 to 1960, when she received her MFA. These appear almost equally sculptural as painterly, with massive swaths of oil paint troweled on straight from the can. In Girls in the Surf with Moon Casting a Shadow (1962), dark waves peak and crest in a froth of strands. Two female figures emerge from a dark, loosely painted environment suggesting the ocean at night. The left figure in particular resembles Brown, and here we are presented with two of the artists longstanding concerns, self-portraiture and her love of swimming, in particular swimming in the San Francisco Bay.
Brown is one of the second generation of Bay Area Figurative School painters, an informal movement spearheaded in 1950 by David Park with his painting Kids on Bikes. Like Brown, these artists, whose ranks included Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks, and Richard Diebenkorn, were well known for the way in which they combined abstract paint handling techniques with figurative subject matter. Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) presents dark earth tones of the carcass enmeshed in a rich field of viridian. While wall text, and catalog essays, reference Rembrandt here, one might well think of the tortured slabs of meat of Chaim Soutine, with their overtones of hallucinatory intensity and a high-keyed palette. This work was purchased by MOMA New York while Brown was still a student. Dog + Chair in Environment (1961) is another striking example of work of this era, a bull terrier, her beloved Bob the Dog, sitting adjacent to a chair painted in bright blocks of black and hot pink.
Brown’s first marriage was to fellow student William (Bill) H. Brown, they wed in 1956, an alliance that helped motivate her to stay in art school, where she was having a rough time; by providing her with art books, Bill Brown helped launch her love of classical and modernist art. He also encouraged her to take a summer painting class with Elmer Bischoff, who had a profound influence on her and would become her role model and mentor. This first marriage however fell apart fairly quickly, and Joan Brown soon became involved with another CSFA student, the dynamic young sculptor Manuel Neri. This vibrant period of the mid-60s was remarkably fruitful, arguably yielding Brown’s most successful work, with a continuation of the richly impastoed surfaces increasingly inhabited by figures. Neri and Brown married in 1962, their son Noel arrived later in the year. He appears often in her work of the time, portrayed in a knockout leopard costume in Noel on Halloween (1964), and in a mind-blowing Noel’s First Christmas (1963). The same whipped up texture seen earlier as surf recurs here in a white froth suggesting tree flocking.
Refrigerator Painting (1964) is in a sense a portrait of the appliance, in bilious shades of green. It offers an excellent example of her ability to use paint to transcend the mundane subject matter and create something stunning, otherworldly. Another domestic scene, the massive Noel in the Kitchen (1964) is just breathtaking, juxtaposing the imposing color scheme, gobs of cadmium red, the patterning, with the awkwardness of her toddling son, who has somehow lost his diaper. Noel and Bob (1964) also highlights two of the artist’s favorite subjects in a background of formal abstraction. Fur Rat (1962) and Untitled (Bird) (ca 1957-60) share this room, a pair of Brown’s rare sculptures. Each is inhabited by an unsettling energy, as if haunted by the ghosts of birds and rodents from time immemorial.
Brown was phenomenally successful with this body of work, showing in major museum shows including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Young America 1960:Thirty American Painters under Thirty-Six, a New York exhibition Women in American Art along with Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keefe, and others, being represented by the Staempfli Gallery in New York—which also provided her a monthly stipend—and her work gracing the cover of Artforum. Creating such a powerful body of work at such a young age, Brown had perhaps painted herself into a corner. Discussing her reasons for abandoning this way of working, she mentioned that it no longer felt authentic, that she had discovered she could “fake spontaneity.” The artist also expressed dismay upon realizing that she had to continue to produce works in a certain style to satisfy the market demands of dealers or collectors.
Neri and Brown drifted apart and divorced in 1966. Certainly the shift from sharing a home and studio with Neri, whose sculptures were also based in gesture and physicality, to being on her own, must have changed her way of looking at things. In any event, despite the recognition she was continuing to receive for the expressionistic, bravado painting, she felt she could no longer work that way, her freedom of choice being of greater importance to her. Realizing she still had much to learn, Brown set out to be her own teacher.
Green Bowl (1964) is an example of a transitional piece, as Brown’s early gestural style evolved into one more pared down, eventually graphic. In this intimately-scaled work, the paint is still thickly applied, but her palette, and the subject matter, is muted, more Morandi-like. Not on display are two significant works from this time in her life, ones the artist would refer to when giving presentations on her work. The first, a still life of eggs and a cucumber, Still Life #1 (1965) the artist spent a year laboring over, and, while not certainly not the best painting, an important document of that stage of her life. She also put considerable effort into replicating the image of the Dreyfus lion, from their advertising logo. (Lion in Fake Environment (1967)) It is perhaps at this juncture, when Brown began unapologetically mining any veins of source material that appealed to her, that her critical acceptance began at times to flounder.
In 1968 Brown married another fellow artist, Gordon Cook, whose Minimalist still life style also echoed Morandi. A shared passion for art and the ability to mutually support each other’s work was important at the time. In the wake of her short-lived flirtation with Minimalism, her next style evolved to include more representationally painted figures and animals, with paint applied in a flatter, two-dimensional manner. With neither thick paint, nor the illusion of volume created with shading and rendering, the artist began to rely primarily on her elegant and deft line, bold color choices, patterning, and unusual compositions.
Joan Brown (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Katherine Du Tiel
Brown and Cook had moved to the Sacramento River delta, where she worked in a converted barn. Running out of paint one day she dashed off to the hardware store and bought what they had, oil enamel. This is the kind of paint used on cars, or metal furniture, more than in fine art. She was delighted to find it was quick-drying, brilliantly colored, and shiny—all qualities she’d been looking for. In Memory of My Father J.W. Beatty (1970) was Brown’s first work to combine enamel paint and glitter, using her dog Allen and other animals appearing clustered around a wooden chest which had belonged to her dad—who had recently died of a heart attack—in an homage. (It is perhaps telling that Brown created no such testament in honor of her mother—a troubled woman of Mexican/Danish heritage, Vivien Beatty hung herself six weeks after the passing of her husband.) Evoking an era, Portrait of a Girl (1971) uses a family photo of a lost-looking Brown in front of a Chinese dragon, an understated testament to a sad and dysfunctional childhood. Bright spots in her early world were poring over books about Egypt and swimming in the chilly SF Bay nearby.
Grey Cat with Madrone and Birch Trees (1968) presents a haunting image featuring a very knowing cat, echoing another one of Brown’s influences, Rousseau. She enjoyed creating her own world as a stage for the narrative in her paintings, and appreciated a similar freedom to that of self-taught painters. With a particular passion for dogs and cats, animals as companions and symbols were extremely important in her work. The Bride (1970) is an amazing iconic Brown work, where a cat-headed figure and giant pet rat manifest in a field of poppies and sky full of fish. Somehow this work seems fully a self-portrait of the artist, embodied in feline form.
The next room is filled with self-portraits from the 1970s. Brown’s unflinching self-examination ranges from the more playful to a very subdued double portrait, Christmas Time 1970 Joan + Noel (1970) in front of a tree shedding leaves, her hands placed lovingly on her son’s shoulders. Along with her adoption of animal avatars and Egyptian-inspired hybrid creatures, Brown borrows a page from Rembrandt in her use of costume, as is reflected in a number of the self-portraits, whether dressed in Moorish attire at the Alhambra, in sexy underwear and a cat mask, or a furry hat.
Joan Brown had always enjoyed swimming in the frigid waters of the Bay, and in 1972 she took it up with a passion, enlisting the accomplished Charlie Sava as her coach. Perhaps the danger and challenge of it were also part of the attraction. She had a very strong rebellious streak, and it at times seems if someone or something were labeled off limits it would make her pursue that very goal with increased vigor.
A striking piece of the legend of Joan Brown is her near-fatal experience the night of the Dolphin Club’s first ever all women’s Alcatraz swim. Large freighters which should have been told to steer clear of the area had not received the message, and she and other swimmers were caught in the choppy wake of the boats, unable to complete their swim. As she recounts, “seven swimmers were pulled from the water.”
This extremely traumatic experience in recounted, tellingly, in a filtered manner. Placid, introspective women, wearing clothes with nautical prints, stand or sit in quiet, orderly rooms. Only the paintings hanging on the walls tell the true story, as female swimmers flail helplessly in choppy waters, a lighthouse and island in the distance. After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (1975) features a woman in a sleeveless blue dress, with trim resembling an anchor, who drapes her arm across the brick mantle above a roaring fire. Above, a very graphic image of a swimmer in distress, with a gaping mouth, limbs flailing, in churning waves. Behind, a darkened silhouette of the SF skyline.
In a back hallway, a brief video interview with the artist loops. Viewers quickly grasp that Brown was extremely strong and tough-minded, yet simultaneously it conveys a sense of her vulnerability. She flashes her remarkable pale green/blue eyes, always meticulously made up with shadow and liner, as she expresses how her work is at heart addressing essential issues of the human condition, and how connection to others through artwork makes her feel less alone, less “crazy.”
Brown and Gordon Cook loved dancing, as reflected by many works from the early 70s such as The Dancers in the City #2 (1972). A large dog dominates, with the knowing expression often held by Brown’s animals who seem to make mute commentary on the scene. The dancers look away from each other, the man just an outline. The pair divorced in 1978.
Nearing the end of the exhibition, and inching as well toward the end of Brown’s life, is a vibrant display of her travel paintings from the 1970s. The Journey #1 a couple stride toward the left edge of the canvas, the woman taking the lead, the man carries a red suitcase bearing the words “il Viaggio.”. With a rudimentary environment of lavender buildings, and sky of deep Prussian blue, the figures are done quickly, like gesture drawings, with bold, confident lines of black, red, and white.
Her drawing, which is sometimes dismissed as “cartoonish” due to the simplification of form and two-dimensional aspect, was indeed spare—but elegant, graceful, and confident. Particularly drawn to ancient art, and art from China and Japan, she keenly appreciated the way in which a sophisticated economy of means often described form, expressing outrage that such works were often labeled “primitive.” She had a similar attitude toward the idea of perspective, that it was open to many different methods of interpretation.
Brown’s transition to a life of spiritual devotion coincided with a union with her fourth, and final, husband, Michael Hebel, both disciples of the same guru, Sathya Sai Baba. Hebel was “a cop,” as Brown would proudly state, and clearly by their marriage in 1980 her allegiance to the dictates of the art world were looser than ever. Once again, Brown would take her artwork in the direction that fulfilled her own needs, rather than those of others.
Her last body of paintings were closely tied to her spiritual journey. In The Search (1977) Brown conflates her image and ego with 4th dynasty Egyptian Princess Nofret. Both women appear imperial, commanding. Sheer garments reveal the body beneath. A background of shimmery turquoise and violet presages the works to come where energy fields become an important component. Harmony (1982), a diptych, juxtaposes the sun and moon, a figure half Brown on one side, half a human-sized orange cat on the other, in a portrayal of the duality of her nature. A New Age- The Bolti Fish (Transformation) (1984) features a tiny figure of Brown poised in the mouth of a large colorful fish. The bolti fish, which hatches its eggs in its mouth, was a symbol of reincarnation in ancient Egypt, and Brown here documents her own spiritual rebirth.
By the exhibition’s exit, a tall sculpture stands, Cat and Rat Obelisk, (1981) which hints hauntingly at her tragic death. Brown had traveled to Puttaparthi, India, to install an obelisk at the Eternal Heritage Museum in honor of Sai Baba. A turret overhead collapsed, killing the artist instantly. While a tremendous loss to her loved ones, and the art community, many sensed Brown had already ascended to a new plane and was on some level ready to move on.
Joan + Donald (1982) offers a charming and touching farewell in a self-portrait with her cat, and notorious model, Donald. Brown gazes off into the distance, clutching the cat lovingly, protectively. The cat, gazing straight at the viewer, braces forelegs on the figure’s shoulders, paws spread, claws perhaps sunk in to clutch her back.
In Joan Brown, SFMOMA has accomplished a major feat of tribute to an important 20th century artist from the Bay Area. If curatorial bets seem at times a bit hedged, I will not look this gift horse too closely in the mouth. It bears noting that the description of this retrospective as the first in 20 years disregards the excellent and major Brown exhibition This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, mounted in 2012 at the San Jose Museum of art, curated by Jodi Throckmorton. I’ve written about Brown twice before, reviewing the San Jose Museum show as well as a dynamite drawing show, Joan Brown in Living Color, presented at Richmond Art Center in 2017, and thought I might have my final say here, but somehow I don’t think my thoughts and research about Brown have yet been fully realized. Perhaps in my own next life…
Painter Devorah Jacoby has always presented a complex internal world in her works. Coming to her career in art after a practice in psychotherapy, she is familiar with the intricacies of the mind and the dances we perform in response to our emotions and surroundings. In her latest body of work Inside Out, currently on view at Seager Gray Gallery, this world is inhabited primarily by women—women often lost in thought, submerged in a landscape that at times obscures or threatens to engulf them.
Outside oil on canvas 48″ x 48″ 2021
Jacoby’s surfaces are juicy, her command of oil paint is deft and joyous—here expressing a surprising and at times flamboyant melding of styles from pointillism to realism to splatters, knife painting, and even occasionally including some glitter. Outside (2022) features a woman in a full, swirling green skirt. Eyes closed, she is in and of nature. The upper half of the canvas is scraped and scumbled, scratched and marked with orange drips and a periwinkle blue outline, like a butterfly. Here, as elsewhere, a pattern of rectangular blocks of color suggests a broad pointillist stroke as well as a bit of the geometrical abstract passages in Gustave Klimt.
With the subtext of the pandemic shutdown and how all our lives were upended as a kind of undergirding principle, Jacoby’s tense, often dysfunctional or emotionally-fraught human dynamics have let up a bit in most of these works, as if finding relief from the challenges of daily life in painting the beauty of nature tipped the scales away from too much psychological tension. The artist spent time in Wyoming during shelter-in-place, and found abundant inspiration in the landscape. Jacoby uses gardens, plants, and in particular flowers to repeatedly draw the eye, and cause it to linger, in moments of pure pleasure.
I Can Feel Your Heart Beating oil on panel 12″ x 12″ 2022
Appearing in two versions, I Can Feel Your Heart Beating (2022) evokes some of the darker regions of Jacoby’s world, as an introspective young girl holds a disembodied heart in front of her white jumper. The words evoke a sweet moment of lovers, perhaps, in close embrace, while the more clinical vision presented suggests an opposite reading, something rent asunder, death, disease, or perhaps love gone bad. We may also recall the iconic works of Frida Kahlo, where externalized organs symbolize the physical and emotion pain which that artist endured.
Reading oil on canvas 14″ x 11″ 2022
Reading (2022) is an excuse for more juicy brushwork, an explosion of pattern including folds of creamy tones marked with yellow and orange splotches, a profusion of wild daisies forming a dense blanket in the foreground. Two parted feet and ankles draw the viewer inward, to an ambiguously rendered interior space. A blurry red form, the book, dissolves into a blotchy sky of blue and pink. The absence of a head or upper body offers a bit of a shock, and can be read a humorous, or disquieting, or both.
Fruits de Terre acrylic and oil on canvas 36″ x 60″ 2022
Fruits de Terre (2022) is the star of the exhibition. A red room houses woman clutching a Toy Poodle, the scene conveying a European Modernist vibe echoing Matisse and Manet. A red vase, patterned with the recurring rectangular color blocks, holds assorted flowers in warm hues, an array of food, salads, strawberry shortcake, even crustaceans, creating a tour de force of color and texture. Adding to the visual texture are charcoal lines delineating a cake and various cooking implements.
Lilypad oil on canvas 24″ x 12″ 2022
Lilypad (2022), a mid-sized vertical work, is mysterious, dark in hue and subject matter. A female form is splayed out across a horse. A bright red pattern wraps her body, reading alternately as fabric marked by pattern, or more disturbingly, as blood. Rough green circles, the pads of the title, fill the lower portion of the canvas. The woman’s leg and foot hang limply along those of the horse, one may well wonder exactly what kind of nocturnal ride has just transpired.
Flowers All Year oil on canvas 60″ x 48″ 2016-2022
In Flowers All Year (2016-2022) it is interesting to explore how the bouquet dissolves into geometry and gesture simultaneously, as does a woman’s face on its right, her right eye obscured by a giant orange rose. This bounty of flowers, a recurring device in the show, thus becomes a bit menacing, is this a surfeit of pleasure?
Horizon oil on canvas 36″ x 36″ 2022
Horizon (2022) forces the issue of the figure’s immersion in the paint, bringing the rectangular marks front and center, a small nude seen from the rear appears as if in an attempt to pry them apart and enter the space. Starfish (2022), a dreamy exploration of every shade of blue, features a tiny form of the sea creature alongside a girl in a red bathing suit, a foil to all the cool hues. This work is one of the most successful in allowing the viewer to become vicariously immersed in the beauty and tranquility of nature.
Starfish oil on canvas 36″ x 36″ 2022
Jacoby is a gifted painter, her skillful mix of generous swaths of seductive color and creamy paint entice the viewer into a space where the mental world intersects with the visual, introspection meshed with observation. Yet here, in this body of work, the figures appear strikingly and unmistakably alone, the only narrative one we may construct as to how and why they are isolated. Certainly an apt device for a dark time of social distancing, yet Jacoby’s disarming use of the power of nature to soothe and delight us ultimately puts a surprisingly positive spin on a time that has been anything but.
With a flood of recent solo shows and accolades over the past couple of years, it seems as if painter M. Louise Stanley’s ship has come in. Her current exhibition is No Regrets, at the Marin MOCA in Novato. Behind the entry desk, Bad Bankers (2011) escorts us into Stanley’s world with a line of contrite businessmen carrying briefcases, awaiting their turn to be spanked on their bare bottoms by an oversized goddess of justice. One could only wish that misbehaving power-brokers could all be taken down to size this easily.
Bad Bankers (2011), acrylic on paper, 30″ x 40″
The exhibition proceeds, for the most part, chronologically, and while weighted toward the artist’s later works, there are some gems from earlier years on view. The Mystic Muse and The Bums Who Sleep in the Golf Course Behind the Oakland Cemetery (1970), a small watercolor, is the earliest work on display. Stanley, “Lulu” to her friends, attended CCAC, (now California College of the Arts) and obtained her MFA in 1969, forming consciousness-raising groups with similarly feminist-minded friends. They often gathered to paint intimate, narrative watercolors, going against the grain of large, abstract oil paintings. We may note many features that predict the artist’s subsequent work, her palette, with its acid greens set against warm hues, is largely in place, we see already her love of patterning and costume, and the juxtaposition of the sexual—a naked “muse” with thrusting breasts—and the macabre, the creepy “bums” in their graveyard setting.
The Mystic Muse and The Bums Who Sleep in the Golf Course Behind the Oakland Cemetery (1970), watercolor, 11″ x 15″
Death of a Saleswoman (1981) adapts the title from Arthur Miller’s moody play, and invents a fictive tale of a door-to-door saleswoman, perhaps an Avon lady, who has been shot in the chest, spurting blood in a dramatic arc. A sprinkler on the lawn twins this image with its own benign gusher. The gunslinger is a woman wearing a high-heeled mule with a pink pompon. The subtext here is how women have historically been pitted against one another, the stay-at-home-mom, for example, versus the career woman, both battling over stakes that are depressingly small.
If the Shoe Fits (1976), watercolor, 22″ x 30″
Perhaps, like Warhol, Stanley may have a bit of a foot fetish—her emphasis on feet and footwear a recurring device dating back at least to If the Shoe Fits (1976) a discomfiting interlude of barely-contained sexual tension between a languid shoe-salesman and his eager customer. In these earliest works the distortion of the figures is more extreme, arching breasts, pointy noses and chins suggesting Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, The Hairy Who and the world of underground comix. Later figures remain stylized, often retaining comically-exaggerated features. A tendency throughout to present women as oversexualized caricatures, bitches, whores and temptresses, reflects the way they are so often portrayed in our culture. She employs a similar device to that used by the late, great, Black painter Robert Colescott—turning the tables on an oppressive culture by shoving caricatures back in its face.
The Mouth of Hell (Catherine Cleves Hours) (2018), gouache, 16″ x 12″
A sextet of mid-scale works on paper in gouache, painted as if pages taken from an illuminated manuscript, fits nicely along a curving wall in the middle gallery. A stunning version of The Mouth of Hell (Catherine of Cleves Hours) (2018) is both funny and more than a little scary. Small green devils prod and poke small damned souls, tossing them into the gaping maw of a structure both feline and architectural. Ars Longa for Ed (2020) offers a touching memorial to gallerist Ed Gilbert who sadly passed last year. (Stanley represented by Anglim/Trimble Gallery, the torch having been passed from Paule Anglim to Ed, and now to the resilient Shannon Trimble.) Gilbert, known for his stylish appearance, sports a natty outfit of red pants and a green shirt, with additional jackets and footwear mingled among vines embellishing the edges of the page.
Some of Stanley’s strongest works reside in her prodigious collection of sketchbooks, an accumulation of years of copious notes, skillful ink drawings, spontaneous color studies and fully-realized paintings—many of which have been created on the go, often in Italy, where she led countless art lovers on tours. A few of these remarkable journals are open on display here, under plexiglas vitrines.
In one, Piazzole dei Cavalli Marini, Borghese Gardens presents a three-tiered fountain, rising from a base of the torsos of rearing, spouting horses, bathed in a warm glow of rosy peach and grey-greens that co-mingle in a masterful play of light. A Grimacing Selfie, sketched with pen and ink, shows Stanley’s love of the grotesque with its twisted mouth, spotted chin, sagging jowls, angry eyes and crazy tufts of hair. We may recall some of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, where he likewise reflects mercilessly at his aging, fallible visage.
Jupiter and Io (2008), acrylic on canvas, 62″ x 80″
Many significant works are clustered in the last gallery. Jupiter and Io (2008) a particular favorite, is a tongue-in-cheek retelling of the Roman myth of infidelity and sexual predation by shape-shifting gods. Io, in a clingy slip of peach-colored satin, is perched off balance on one foot, as a shoe flies off another. Her legs are encased in seamed nylons; the costuming, postures and personas of many of Lulu’s characters evoke a somewhat 1940s vibe—something out of Thomas Hart Benton, perhaps, with a nod to film noir.
Stanley frequently uses animal avatars to comment on the scene at hand. A furry little terrier stands guard, mouth agape, gazing intently at his mistress’ encounter with Jupiter, who manifests as a voluminous puff of steam that rapidly disperses through the nether-regions of Io’s attire. Achingly-beautiful details—a glass of milk, alluding to Io’s transformation to a heifer at one point in the legend and a dangling nylon so transparent and delicate you just can’t stand it—are contrasted with less subtle passages, notably a table lamp whose base consists of a pair of formally-dressed figures recoiling in exaggerated horror.
Melencholia (After Durer)2012, acrylic on canvas, 62″ x 80″
One of the big issues we face when discussing Stanley’s art is its abundant and unremorseful irreverence. In the exhibition catalog, the artist is quoted as saying “I strive for that precarious line between the colloquial and the sublime, perhaps in order to sabotage both extremes, but more often just to see if I can get pull it off.” That transgressive streak runs broadly through much of the work, and, like so many things, is both a blessing and a curse. A somewhat atypical take on this issue of humor is found in the ambitious Melencholia (After Dürer) (2012) featuring “The Archetypal Artist,” Stanley’s alter-ego, holding a jester’s mask bearing a dour expression in front of her own smiling face, trying to get the subject Melencholia, and/or a similarly grumpy putti to smile. Is Stanley suggesting that, like Dürer, she struggles with a tendency to melancholy? Just who, here, is pulling the leg of whom?
Anatomy Lesson (2003) acrylic on canvas 72″ x 96″
Anatomy Lesson (2003) is a very funny, tour-de-force work. This massive canvas presents overly-sedate art students, one with severely bad bangs, diligently working away as a bizarre scene unfolds. Their models consist of “The Artist,” clad in her signature lime-green pedal pushers and red and white striped top, and a pair of dancing partners who appear to have stepped out of Grey’s Anatomy. Her face is titled skyward in ecstasy, evoking Bernini’s St. Teresa. A skeleton, behind her cadaver partner, taps with a bony finger to cut in. We sense Stanley’s enduring love affair with the canvas, and with her muse, as often leaving her a bit breathless, with raw nerves exposed.
Gothic Revival (1997), gouache, 40″ x 26″
A pair of pithy works spinning liturgical tales anchor the two south corners. Gothic Revival (1997) is a beautiful medium-scale work where gouache paint describes a shadowy corner of a gothic cathedral, all vaulted arches and wrought iron, but our eye is drawn by a revelatory stream of yellow light to focus on the small figure of a distinctly male baby having its diaper changed on a bench in an alcove. The vertiginous composition accentuates the lofty architecture. Virgin Birth, Barcelona (1996) is also a small knockout, here painted in acrylic. A woman in a narrow gallery flanked by medieval statues of Madonna and Child appears poised to reenact her own nativity scene.
The artist often bemoans the fact that in the 1980s she developed an allergy to oil paint, necessitating the switch to the less responsive medium of acrylics. If acrylics can’t really pull off quite the same look or feel as oils, Lulu is one of the very best around at coaxing the medium into submission, achieving subtle tonal variations and delicate tactile qualities that are fairly astonishing.
Self-Portrait (After Ensor)(1992), gouache, 22″ x 30″
Coming full circle, we may find a small gouache near the entryway Self-Portrait (After Ensor) (1992) Here, riffing off the eccentric 19th century Belgian painter James Ensor, the artist presents herself as a skeleton laid out on a slab, with head and back propped up. The skull, which has retained both teeth and thick ropes of spiky orange hair, gazes disconsolately at the viewer. Her neatly-folded capris and tunic at last cast aside, palette and brushes nearby at the ready.
Stanley has lived an uncompromising life, and as the title suggests, is at this stage of the game largely content with how things have played out. With a boundless imagination and keen wit, coupled with formidable draftsmanship and painterly skills, her work is poised to withstand the test of time.
Barbara Morris
M. Louise Stanley: No Regrets at Marin MOCA by appointment through April 18
