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
