The Grand Tour
M. Louise Stanley at Anglim/Trimble
With civil rights and freedom of the press in a precarious state these days, it’s a welcome break to step into the world of M. Louise Stanley, a painter whose work is inextricably intertwined with these ideals. Emeryville-based Stanley’s current show at Anglim/Trimble offers work spanning four decades. The title “The Grand Tour” evokes the ritual, popular from the 17th century onward, of undertaking an exhaustive journey to study the art treasures of Europe, particularly the classical antiquities of Italy, and reflects the fact that the artist has made this trek innumerable times, both on her own and as the leader of “art lovers tours.”
Entering the gallery, we are immediately drawn to an installation in the corner, Pompeiian Villa (1983-85). Using papier-mâché, masonite, and paint, Stanley creates a striking simulacrum of a classical portico, an imposing yet wistful image evoking a time long past. This installation, exhibited for the first time in 20 years, notably appeared at SFMOMA in 1986 in an ambitious group exhibition “Second Sight” curated by then museum-director Graham Beal. It was a heady time, and the villa glows with a sense of wonder, reflecting Stanley’s burgeoning love affair with Italy then recently kindled by her initial, NEA Grant-funded, solo tour.
Anchoring the installation is Pygmaliana (1984), an oil painting inset into the villa’s wall. Stanley’s alter-ego, a female artist clad in lime green capri pants and a red and white striped shirt, faces her canvas. A hulking/hunky male figure comes to life, echoing the statue in the Greek myth. Emerging from the canvas to enter three-dimensional space, his sudden animation—and sexual advances—startle both the wide-eyed painter and her companion, an arching tuxedo cat, who bristle in response. From the earliest works, her figurative impulse appears as the stylistic love-child of American Regionalism and Underground Comix. As a rule, these quirky figures inhabit contrasting settings, often breathtaking classical environments of dazzling complexity and virtuoso brushwork. It bears mentioning that Stanley developed an allergy to oil paint in the late 1980s; the need to learn to paint all over again proved to be a blessing in disguise, as her command of the medium of acrylic paint to convey nuance and tonal gradations is unrivaled.
Lulu, as Stanley is routinely known, is obsessed by mythology. Her love of these tales of passion, revenge, and transformation infuses nearly every canvas with an otherworldly feeling, a reaching back to the past, to the stories which have informed the development of our Western civilization, and to the heavens, as she awaits inspiration from her muse. Odysseus and the Sirens (2017) depicts the Homeric tale of the sailor and his crew attempting to avoid shipwreck. As with all too many tales that inform our cultural heritage, women routinely get a bum rap. A feminist reframing of these legends is generally Stanley’s tack, although here the story hews close to the original. Tethered to the mast, Odysseus looks more than a bit uneasy, as do his hapless crew at the oars. Unearthly beings, in the form of gigantic female heads with tendrils of golden hair and diaphanous wings, emerge from the folds of the sails, as they attempt to lure the sailors to their doom.
Stanley is never one to steer clear of controversy, and Suffer the Little Children (2010) tackles the issue of pedophilia in the Catholic church. A bemused tourist observes a trio of figures perched on a pedestal—a beneficent priest, sporting a halo, and two devoted young boys, making gestures of supplication. Like the tourist, we may feel supremely discomfited by the scene. The cathedral’s rich interior is beautifully rendered in glowing tones of green and gold, and our conflicted impulse reflects a mixture of attraction to the splendor and beauty of Renaissance art, yet a revulsion toward the corruption and attendant ills attached to its patronage.
An infectious sense of humor is one of the qualities that sustain the work, giving it a satiric bite harkening to Daumier or, a more contemporary match, the consummate Neo-Cubist Robert Colescott. As noted previously, (see “No Regrets” Articultures 2021) Stanley uses a parallel device, turning the tables on sexist caricatures, much as Colescott, a Black artist, did in his scathing critiques of racism. The solemnity, or perhaps pretension, of the settings often acts as a foil to startling vignettes of human drama. Apparition, Venice (2006), a case in point, displays a majestically ornate cathedral, a row of pews the backdrop for the unexpected appearance of a pair of glowing bare female legs encroaching on the aisle. Adjacent, in Gothic Revival, Barcelona (1997), towering, vertiginous vaulted arches attract a few tourists strolling through the darkened interior, as a shaft of light streams in on the decidedly secular scene of a woman changing a baby’s diaper. We may be shocked, or contemplate the idea of the divine within this “everybaby.”
The exhibition’s title work, The Grand Tour (2023), is focused on a quintet of overweight, underdressed American tourists relaxing in the Piazza Navona. Using a recurring device, based on observation, she captures the groups’ fixation on their phones, rather the the majestic Fountain of Neptune—Stanley does not suffer fools gladly. We may recall our dismay at finding such ubiquitous, decidedly uncultured, tourists blocking our views at the Vatican, the Louvre, or the Prado, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous quote, “hell is other people.”
A handful of her remarkable travel journals are glimpsed in a vitrine in the rear of the gallery. These sketchbooks are among Lulu’s most remarkable works, her dedication to her craft, her draftsmanship, and the weight of the hours of time and energy expended on them, infuse these small objects with a talisman-like power. Here we most clearly sense her unshakable conviction in the redemptive power of paint.
Most relevant to today’s circumstances, Triumph of Flora, after Tiepolo (2023) celebrates the tale, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of beings transformed into flowers; the 18th century original, The Empire of Flora, hangs in the Legion of Honor. Atop a sunlit hill, with a Golden-Gated city spread out below, a transgender Flora is drawn in a gilded chair by gleeful naked cherubs. With a Pride flag fluttering above, a joyful throng of diverse revelers, dancing and cavorting, enter the picture from the right, while tattooed bikers make an appearance on the left. Statuary includes a pair of sphinxes, creatures of ambiguous gender and species, an allusion to the idea of the potency of hybrid beings—an apt metaphor as well for Lulu’s own artwork, as it meshes seemingly incongruous genres of high and low art. A pairing of Tiepolo and Stanley would present a memorable scene at The Legion, a provocative yet perhaps natural spot for a larger survey of her classical appropriations.
A striking exhibit, “The Grand Tour” reveals a mature artist working at her best. With an abundance of interest in Stanley’s work, nearly universal acclaim at the critical level, and numerous, significant recent exhibitions on both coasts, her work is ripe for major institutional exposure. The trajectory of her future career, as Stanley herself would certainly attest, lies in the hands of The Fates.
Barbara Morris
M. Louise Stanley “The Grand Tour” will close Saturday, February 22 at Anglim/Trimble, SF.
hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-5