Newspaper Page Text
Page 8
Flagpole Magazine
April 1, 1992
Art Encounters
Bacchus and the Beast
The dolls are personifications of anguish, memento
mori, simultaneous creations in order to remember and
remembrances in order to forget; simultaneously a return of
the repressed and an overloading of the memory system in
order to forget; they permit that mourning without which
history itself is an abomination, a lie.’ This quote from the
French artist M chel Nedjar reminds me of forms coming in
and out of v.ew, repressed thoughts surfacing and a
close relationship between time-presen: and time-past.
The artist has an overwhelming need to recreate like a
god, from memory and from material, a material with the
power of a subconscious remembrance of the first
material
Elame de Kooning is an abstract expressionist, her
paintings exhibit more than just a desire to be true to her
style but also a searching with bold strokes — horizontal
or vertical emphasis, alternating through her career with
peak and prostrate The retrospective show has been
hung at the Georgia Museum of Art through May 3 and
includes 53 works spanning the artist’s 50-year passion for
color, gesture, light and life — all the elements of abstract
expressionism.
Elame de Kooning's place on the time line is a place
to envy; she was caught in the mid-century artistic hub,
the bohemian intellectual's hive in the cafes and studios
of New York She fed off of the artist’s activity for her
widely read newspaper articles as well as he r own work.
I must interject that I am here if any artist wishes to feed
me their thick messages — so far .t has been sparce. I find
Elame de Kooning to be a good example of strength against
tne popular tides since she resisted her husband's ada
mant wish to negate the figurative. She painted the only
Abstract Exoressiomst style portraits, which was looked
down upon by the rising stars of art: Rothko. Still, Reinhardt
and Pollock.
Athens has been marked indelibly by Elaine de Kooning s
work since she was the first University of Georgia s Lamar
Dodd visiting professor of art. The Bacchus paintings were
completed while in residency but were inspired by a 19th
Century statue in Paris. These paintings are erotic in their
nature and in their humanness; the skin of the statue
Athens has
been marked
indelibly by
Elaine de
Kooning's
work...she
was the first
University of
Georgia’s
Lamar Dodd
visiting
professor
of art.
emerges from a thick bog of moss The skin is abstracted
and it is a bloated mass rising up like grey stone from waves
or windblown gardens. It is a lovely arrangement of splaying
limbs and crevices. "Bacchus #63" (1982) is my favorite, an
orgy of foreshortened oody parts
De Kooning is a map through time Her paintings are her
surroundings; the conversation, the monuments and land
scape, the people and the period of time. Her focus is
strong in series, bent over and concentrated. The paintings
I found most engaging had time as their pique In 1983
Elaine de Kooning traveled to the French Pyrenees to see
the 15,000-year-old cave paintings in the Dordogne Valley
The prehistoric images unearthed a well spring of familiarity
for her, and from this we are given her cave paintings —
the drips as expressionistic as ever and rich in earthy
tones, trampled over by translucent bison with drooping
bellies. The beasts are a welcome image for me — a rich
savage element, which breathes of hair and dus: and
then fades again into a simple line carrying into the wide
open spaces.
For me the most successful painting follows the
cliche that doesn't always work — bigger is better,
"High Wall" (1987, Cave #112). The three panels are
explored like terrain, sparce in some spots and then
possessed with paint in the animal’s thigh. The forms
seem to have grazed from the proceeding frame in a
spray of rose-colored mud. I quote from oi ^ of the
plexiglass panels; “The time of the Bison series incorpo
rates time present as abstraction, as spaiial movement
and directional force, as velocity, with colors under anc
over images, sometimes rising sometimes sinking as if
obliterated by time. Time as the distance between now
and then and as the distance between beginning and
" end of painting itself, merges in a rhythm that resonates
and reverberates with the music of the great migrations
when animals thundered across the Ice-aged landscape."
Granted, the earth may not move for you when you stand m
front of the paint, but imagine hooves and dust and opera
and oamt all in a dimly lit room — then something may s: r
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