M. Louise Stanley: No Regrets
Marin MOCA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) 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.
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.
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