This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Robert Gordy, Study for Evesville, acrylic on canvas, 30V2" X 32 V*", 1976 (photo: courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.). Robert Gordy New Orleans Museum of Art New Orleans, Louisiana April 25 - June 14, 1981 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Montgomery, Alabama August 1-30, 1981 Jacksonville Art Museum Jacksonville, Florida September 17 - November 1, 1981 Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Winston-Salem, North Carolina February 5 - March 21, 1982 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas May 1 - June 6, 1982 I had never seen an entire exhibi tion of works by Robert Gordy before this show, and my first look at Gordy’s retrospective exhibition was an optical feast of color and pattern. It was also a renewal of acquaintance with early twentieth century French imagery, filtered through the elegant sensibilities of a later twentieth cen tury artist. Gordy’s imagery conveys an inter est in Cezanne, Matisse, Degas and Leger. Gordy’s female figures in land scapes recall those in Matisse’s Luxe, Calme, et Volupte, Cezanne’s bathers, Degas’s spied-upon toweling women, and Leger’s blimpy, machine-tooled women. The similar postures in Gordy’s paintings are in no way a result of mindless mimicry. The time-worn poses are iconic and suitable in or as motifs because they permit the artist to deal with the human form without overly person alizing each figure. Gordy’s colors are often exotic or unnameable. Their relationships usually revolve around a single basic hue, either a brown or a gray tinge with a primary or secondary color. Thus, a Gordy color scheme is grounded optically and psycholog ically in a field of color with an inten sity level which is functionally neither bright nor dull. Hard edges have been an essential feature of Gordy’s work since 1967. Such edges allow the artist to deal only with predetermined discrete hues and values. Gordy’s faceted forms are a logical manifestation of sharp hue and tone divisions, leading the eye in a staccato fashion around the objects within a painting (as David Park might have done, albeit with a large, heavily loaded brush) and on an ex hilarating chromatic journey across a picture surface. Gordy’s use of hard edges queues up precisely with his col- oristic intentions. Hard edges for Gordy dictate that no pigmentary blends of tone or color transpire; each color is flatly painted and distinct from all others. No blending results in no awkwardly muddy transitional colors or tones appearing. The viewer can count the colors and tones in a Gordy painting; there are seldom more than four colors or four tones. Reductive? Certainly. Easy? No! Gordy seems to have arrived at his present style in the late 1960’s. Languidly posed nudes, assorted still life objects, oddly projected quasi cubes, palm trees or cacti, vaguely prismatic patterns, abstract linear rhythms, and unrecognizable floating objects are interchangeable motifs for Gordy, but the stylistic program for incorporating these images is set. The real variable in Gordy’s work, his true obsession, is color. One might argue that no new colors or even new color relationships can be invented, but Gordy seems to be finding them. The smaller works in the exhibition are enormously varied in approach. Gordy uses colored markers in several later pictures as another artist might use watercolors. At first I wondered how Gordy decided upon markers; surely it was the result of his desire for discrete colors. As exciting as they are in themselves, the marker drawings are studies for his larger acrylic paint ings. The small pre-1967 works in this retrospective show seem to portray an artist refining his attitudes toward figure-ground relationships in many media. By 1968 the omnipresent human figures become obedient and malleable participants in a grand for mal scheme. Only in pictures like Hot Lips (1979) do figures even approach being individualized, but even then they appear to be character types. The 1966 piece, Study for Sister Act, is a small pencil and acrylic image whose two large comic-horrific female nudes confront the beholder much as DeKooning’s Woman series subjects did. The tiny mixed media image (also 1966), Three Females in a Landscape, is an absolute gem, reminiscent of Cezanne’s systematic treatment of form. The work in this retrospective ex hibition links Robert Gordy in some ways to what has been labelled “funk” in recent years. What distinguishes Gordy’s art from that of, for example, William Wiley and Roger Brown, is that the latter two artists deal as much as possible with their own responses to daily life. Their stylistic modes bend to serve their personal visions of life, while Gordy seems to bend life to fit his art. Thomas Hart Benton once lamented that Picasso made art about art, rather than about life; Benton would likely indict Gordy for the same reason. Benton’s possible opinion notwithstanding, Gordy’s continuing fascination with early twentieth cen tury French painting is unusual in influential contemporary American artists. His stylistic predilections toward elegance and beauty, tem pered by an occasional naughty sub ject, deserve consideration due to a healthy dose of mid-twentieth century The Watermelon Show Stanley and Schenk Gallery Atlanta, Georgia June 28 - July 31 The Green Garden Gallery Montgomery, Alabama August 16 - September 16 After countless centuries of cease less, intense research and contempla tion by men of all intellectual capabilities on all continents, it is the proprietors of the Stanley and Schenck (formerly Handshake) Gallery who have succeeded in assembling and exhibiting a com prehensive collection of objects d’esthetique which finally answers that perennial question, “What art hath watermelon wrought?” The Watermelon Show featured paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs and prints by local and regional ar tists, all works fructified from a com mon, thematic seed: that succulent, esculent summertime treat, the watermelon. Initially sprouted from the soil of reductivism. This exhibition of Robert Gordy’s artistic output of the years 1960 through 1980 was guest-curated by Gene Baro and assembled by the New Orleans Museum of Art. The 112-page catalog contains reproduc tions of more pictures than were shown at the Montgomery Museum (due to the museum’s space limita tions, 1 presume), but the Mont gomery installation appears to be a fairly balanced cross section of the entire body of work included in the catalog. The catalog’s introduction, by the exhibit’s curator, is useful and interesting. Gordy’s biographical chronology, near the end of the catalog, is perhaps the most revealing portion of the catalog other than the color reproductions of the art itself. Unfortunately, the catalog’s color reproductions are darker and slightly more blue-ish than the pictures they purport to represent. For those in dividuals who miss the touring Gordy exhibition, the catalog will do little to broadcast what I perceive to be Gordy’s greatest talent—as a colorist. —Mark S. Price Mark Price is a painter and an Assistant Professor of Art at Auburn University. Africa, best grown in hot, moist climates, the 93%-water melon is culturally associated with South erners and Blacks, not necessarily in that order. Actually, it was first cultivated in this country in the early 1600’s and has always been a favorite, sometimes primary food source in many parts of the world, sometimes weighing over 50 pounds. You can feed a lot of starving artists with a 50-pound watermelon or better yet an attractively assembled collection of watermelon art. What we have here is a refreshing way to communicate. A predetermined theme governing the choice of subject matter for an ex hibition may be approached by some observers with acute apprehension and skepticism. The dilution of the “purity” of the “originality” of the artists and the “forced” production of a series of “related” works are two predictable reproaches to the Water melon Show concept, but these are inhibiting and essentially false frames of reference. Denigrating an exhibi tion for its preconceived theme is like dismissing entries to an architectural Nellie Mae Rowe, Warter Mellon Days, crayon on paper, 1981 (photo: courtesy of Stanley and Schenk Gallery). 17 Art Papers September-October 1981
