Night City, 1985-87

It is with great sadness that I write this tribute to my friend, the late Paul Havas. Paul was one of those painters that early returned to the landscape for inspiration, against the prevailing  Abstract Expressionist aesthetic that dominated the cultural scene in the late 50s and early 60s in the United States. Although he made the Pacific Northwest his home, and the wet, salty landscapes of  the area his principal subject, he never forgot the strong structural underpinnings of abstraction that he absorbed during his formative years. It is this adherence to structural rigor, and his refined poetic sensibility, that make his paintings such a unique contribution to the art of the region. Paul was also one of the founding members of the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance.

I first encountered Paul’s work, long before I had met him, at an exhibition entitled “Night City”, at Woodside / Braseth Gallery in 1987. It was a strong show, with starkly balanced compositions of vivid halogen and neon colors amidst deep ultramarine. I still love all of these paintings, which can be seen at his website, http://www.paulhavas.com/, in the ‘earlier work’ section.

Duwamish River, oil, 26 X 64, copyright ©2011

I had an opportunity to meet Paul and his wife Margaret Miller through mutual friend and painter John Laney in the early 1990s. We became friends, sharing interests in landscape painting, literature, obscure artists and many other things. We went painting together many times, and it was Paul who introduced me to Bob Pepper’s Farm, a site that we both returned to over a period of ten plus years. Together in the early 90s we formed the first iteration of the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance, an organization that grew out of figure painting sessions and cafe conversations amongst a small group of like-minded painters.

In the studio Paul was a workhorse, always busy, always experimenting. He would often return to paintings years after they were first declared “finished”, trying to bend their aesthetic direction a little more, sometimes even after they had been sold. He loved to work in charcoal, a medium that well supported his reductionist visual language. A favorite compositional motif was the reframing of a landscape by doorways, bridges, even windows and paintings of paintings. He often played with such ideas, to striking effect. Yet he was never a flashy or facile painter, eschewing virtuosity for simplicity of statement.

Red Roof, oil, 42 X 64, copyright ©2011

I did not see much of Paul after I moved to Panther Lake, though we touched base regularly on the telephone. He would often call after he’d returned from a trip, when he was full of images and ideas. Even after he became ill he tried to spend as much time as his energy permitted in the studio, painting until the end. He leaves a large body of work, spanning many decades. He exhibited regularly at Woodside / Braseth Gallery for over 40 years. He was, and is, the Poet Laureate of the Northwest landscape, and his presence in the places that he loved will be felt for many, many decades to come.

Paul is survived by his wife, the architect Margaret Miller Havas, and daughter Madeleine Miller Fish.

Friend and Colleague (Paul Havas), William E. Elston, oil on canvas, 34 x 36 inches, copyright ©1997

There are several people working to retool the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance for the new millennium. The Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance was originally founded in the early 1990s, by a group of artists that were meeting regularly for figure painting sessions at the studios of William E. Elston and Christel Kratohvil. It’s inaugural meeting was attended by over 40 artists, including some of the most prominent figurative artists from the region.

The NFAA published a bi-monthly journal of reviews, art criticism and rants, and held regular meetings at various artist’s studios and galleries. The organization also sponsored and presented lectures and symposia on topics ranging from Art and Photography to W. P. A. art restorations. During its brief existence as a formal organization it was represented in full-page articles in the Seattle Times and the New Art Examiner, a Chicago-based national art magazine. An article from the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance Journal was reprinted in Harpers Magazine, with attribution but without permission.

The organization was formally active for 5 plus years, and continued as informal relationships between artists and colleagues. With the advent of widespread Internet access, social networking and other technological advances, several of the original members (along with some younger artists,) decided the time was ripe to reinvent the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance. Interest in figurative and Realist art has grown exponentially since the original organization was active. Members of the NFAA believe that it is essential that figurative artists exert their collective influence over the world in which they work, exhibit and teach. Membership in the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance is reserved for professional artists that work in a figurative or Realist style, and who reside in the Pacific Northwest region. That region includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. Further information is available at the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance website, www.nwfigurative.org.

One of my current inspirations is the shin hanga printmakers of Japan.  Shin hanga or ‘new print’ was a movement that spanned the first half of the 20th Century, primarily during the Taisho and Showa periods, and was a deliberate effort to revitalize ukiyo-e printmaking. Whereas shin hanga subjects tended to be primarily of romanticized landscape images, the artists were capable of rather arresting images of the urban environment as well. One of their principal innovations was to print the key plate or block in gray. This caused the key plate to drop back, and de-emphasized linear and calligraphic qualities in favor of color, volume and atmosphere. The artists involved were many; a few of the more prominent were Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Shiro Kasamatsu, Koichu Okada, Toshio Kakihara and many others. I’ve included minimal captions, w/ artist, title, date and publisher.  My intent was simply to present a broad variety of shin hanga subjects to spark others’ interest. The Wikipedia entry for shin hanga can be found here.

I recently had a conversation, via email and facetime, w/ my friend and colleague the watercolorist William Dubin. We were talking about the work of Michael Reardon, a watercolor painter that is getting a great deal of attention lately. We both had similar feelings about Mr. Reardon’s work, and Mr. Dubin was able to articulate them quite nicely in the following excerpted email:

“After we talked yesterday, I went back and looked at the magazine article I had on Michael Reardon, and a couple of things became even clearer. This stuff is SLICK… It’s a ‘production’, only instead of by a factory, it’s by one person, but the means of doing it are the same thing as a factory would use to produce a ‘product’. That’s what I hate about it and nearly every other watercolorist today: They PRODUCE A PRODUCT.”

Michael Reardon, North Tower Nocturne

Dubin continues:

“I’m too much of a 1950′s artist. I spent too much time in A.E. (Abstract Expressionism,) and looking at those painters prior to A.E. like Sargent who WORKED in a similar fashion. The work fed itself, developed IN itself, and reached it’s OWN conclusion. The artist was (is) a catalyst to make these things happen, they are NOT the producer of a play!

“Reardon, and most watercolorists today stand outside of the painting. They DIRECT how it goes together, rather than DISCOVER it. There’s no personal involvement and there are no failures, because once you have the ‘method’ down failure is programed out. watercolor suffers in comparison to oils, in that you can’t get in and FEEL the paint. I think the thing I try hardest to do is to enjoy the involvement WITH the paint – something that may be impossible given the medium, but it’s a big part of what I’m after.

“Do you remember what the 1960′s & 70′s called ‘the happy accident?’ Can you see a painter like Reardon indulging in that, or do you think those things are BANNED from his work! I don’t want to return to Pollack, but I think painting could certainly profit from a touch of EMOTIONALISM right now, because all I see in the watercolor magazines is Stepford Wives art! Prozac in paint! Emotion-less exercises in Graphic Design. In other words a PRODUCT!

“The sad thing is I think very few would find fault with the concept of simply making product. After all, you do art to sell, right? I loved the European concept of art as experiment, the artist as alchemist, the studio as a place of wonder where magic things happened. That’s 100% missing in our capitalist productions of today, even the damn grandmothers in the watercolor societies think about what makes for a salable painting!!!!!!!!!!!”

Like William Dubin, I have many of the same concerns about Reardon’s work. I think that his years of success as an architectural renderer have made him little inclined to experiment beyond a few carefully placed washes and some finicky detail. I would like to see more; the man clearly has some skill, though not as much as his supporters claim.

I would like to contrast his work with that of a watercolor artist living in India, Ramesh Jhawar. I think that Mr. Jhawar clearly has some of what Mr. Dubin feels is missing from Reardon’s work. There is certainly some emotion here, and a spontaneity and command of materials that is both more confident and more relaxed.

Ramesh Jhawar, At The Traffic Light, watercolor on Paper 14.5 x 20 in.

I would not call Mr. Jhawar a great technician, as that is not what comes to mind when looking at his work. Rather his technique is sufficient to his expression, which is I think a more difficult and elusive quality.

Ramesh Jhawar, The Vivid Wall, watercolor on paper 11 x 15 in.

I think that what Mr. Jhawar’s work really communicates is the simple joy of being alive, of being attuned to the subtle changes and surges of sunlight as the community goes about its business. There is a connectedness about Mr. Jhawar’s paintings that is totally missing from Mr. Reardon’s. Even a great painter of alienation must feel the burden of loneliness and regret that alienation entails. A recorder of marks and silhouettes must weave such into a language of feeling, or there is no art there. Robert Henri once remarked, and I am paraphrasing him, that the painter’s brushwork is like a lie detector. One cannot help but express what one is experiencing at the moment the brush is laid to canvas (or paper.) Good and great painting share one thing in common; the ability to communicate the artist’s pleasure and desperation. I see that in the work of Ramesh Jhawar. I don’t see it in the paintings of Michael Reardon.

Ramesh Jhawar, Creek 1, watercolor on paper 11 x 15 in.

The work of Michael Reardon can be seen at http://michaelrreardon.blogspot.com/ . The watercolors of Ramesh Jhawar can be seen at http://www.rameshjhawar.com/ .

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, oil on canvas, 260 cm × 325 cm, 1830, Louvre Museum

“Some artistic temperaments are strong enough to absorb and take advantage of everything. In spite of being brought up in ways that would not have come naturally to them, they find their own path through the mazes of other men’s precepts and examples. They benefit by what is good, and although they sometimes bear the mark of a particular school, they develop into artists like Rubens, Titian, or Raphael. It is absolutely essential that at some moment in their careers, artists should learn not to despise everything that does not come from their own inspiration, but to strip themselves of the almost always blind fanaticism which prompts us all to imitate the great masters and to swear by them alone.”

Eugène Delacroix, Journals,
quoted in ‘Imitation and Authority:  The Creation
of the Academic Canon in French Art, 1648 – 1870
an essay from ‘Partisan Canons’ by Paul Duro

(The works in this slideshow are intended to illustrate the broad variety of artists working in primarily one vein of Realism. The artists represented are scattered across the globe, from Argentina to India. Some of the works do not have complete information, not because I didn’t seek it, but because it was simply not available. If any artists recognize their own work in this presentation, and want to correct the information w/ regards to date, media, title or size, please contact me via this blogsite or via my website at http://www.elston.net . You may use the class inquiry form to reach me.)

Time is an elastic thing. When the Impressionists had their first shows, a few of the artists involved had already achieved some moderate success in the Salon. For all of the controversy that their exhibitions engendered, they had pretty much entered the mainstream by the end of the ensuing decade. No matter which side of the aesthetic divide one stood on, the Impressionists were at least considered a legitimate part of the conversation. Contemporary Realism and Figuration have not fared as well.

In the United States, the art of the 1930s and 40s was dominated by figuration. Social Realism, American Scene, California Style and various Regionalist camps presented a rich tapestry of figurative approaches, joined together by a typically American pragmatism. Many of the artists of this period had been politicized by the Great War and the Great Depression, and many of them were avowed socialists or Marxists. By the late 1940s, and in the wake of the “Advancing American Art” controversy, the establishment had begun to see this as a liability. The country was veering to the right.

During the post-WWII occupation of Europe, the CIA and the U.S. State Department secretly funded European exhibitions of American artists’ works, primarily the Abstract Expressionists. Such efforts were intended to promote American interests abroad, create a diplomatic wedge and recruit European intellectual “assets” for intelligence purposes. It had secondary effects, such as foregrounding this group of artists at home, where European “approval” still carried a great deal of cultural cache. It also had the ancillary effect of accelerating the transition of New York into the gravitational center of the world art market. At the same time, conservative and anti-communist partisans at the Museum of Modern Art, under Alfred Barr Jr., actively tried to purge and marginalize artists with leftist leanings. The reason that the Abstract Expressionists were well suited for these purposes was their avowed apoliticism, and the absence of any possibility of a social narrative in their work.

As for the philosophical and art critical writing of the period, it is often difficult to tease out these nefarious intentions from those with any real sincerity. Clement Greenberg was, since 1950, a member of the CIA-fronted American Committee for Cultural Freedom. His writings are a veritable crusade against the idea of representation in painting or sculpture, as well as promoting the concept that art should instantiate theory above all else. Still, Greenberg was a sophisticated writer. The arguments and historical narratives that evolved in the popular sphere were more starkly black and white. Figuration and Realism represented the forces of conservatism and reaction. Abstraction and conceptualism represented cutting edge radicalism, freedom and cultural evolution. Such formulations constituted an effective sales pitch to elites with money and social aspirations, even as they turned the truth on its head.

As more money entered the art market, these attitudes and their successors became more entrenched. Cultural investment created its own inertia. By the 1970s any gallery that exhibited realist work forfeited credibility, although certain forms of realist figuration had re-entered the cultural vocabulary by virtue of their “ironic” relationship to popular iconography or the mechanization of perception and representation. Yet at the same time nascent revisionist histories of the previous decades and the previous century were causing younger artists to question the assumptions upon which they had been schooled. Writers like Albert Boime, Gerald Ackerman, the father of American Regionalist studies William H. Gerdts and others were turning over stones. In many respects we are still trying to ascertain what crawled out from underneath.

This writer can still remember a time when the predominate surveys used in art history courses at universities and colleges did not mention the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Academies of Europe were reduced to a few disparaging paragraphs. A curator of art at a regional museum in the Northwest referred to pre-WWII art as “moldy oldies”, and the dean of the San Francisco Art Institute called paintings “wall obstructions”. The only South American art that one might see were breakout Pop Art personalities like Marisol and Botero, and Asian art of any kind was virtually unknown. At the dawn of the 1980s the prevailing paradigm for the art world was much the same as the winner-take-all model used in sports, fashion and entertainment. The publishing industry fed an enormous appetite for coffee table books on Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. At the same time a robust economy in academic funding fueled research into some of the more neglected artists and movements from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Books were published on the Realists, the Naturalists, American Impressionists, the Euston Road School, the Russian Itinerants, the Macchiaioli, California Plein Airists, Russian Socialist Realism, etc.

Much of the history of this period and its players still remains to be written; the artists that gravitated around the Soho artist co-op galleries like the Bowery Gallery, Green Street Gallery, First Street Gallery and the Figurative Artists Alliance in Tribecca; The Project for the Living Artist; the residual Boston School, with its legacy of Classicism and American Impressionism; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; the PRB revival at California College of Arts and Crafts; the many other regional movements, including the Northwest Figurative Artists Alliance and related organizations. Unfortunately the era will have to wait for its William Gerdts. Although we are now talking about events and people from the last 50 years, we know scarce little about them. I’m confident that this history will eventually be written, and frankly feel that the historicity claimed by most of the contemporary art market is just a hollow sales pitch, much like the claim that Thomas Kincade’s paintings are heirlooms. I believe that much of the art that claims to be radical today will be judged by the historians of the future to be just market fodder intended to cement the social positions and cultural aspirations of the currently ruling elites, much as the art of the Pompiers did in the late 19th Century.

Figurative and Realist styles in painting, drawing and sculpture have spread across the globe over the past 3 decades, and represent many independent strains. Immigrant, academically trained Social Realists from Russia and China have found work and a ready audience in the West. The burgeoning atelier movement and plein air resurgence have proliferated and, after many years of seeming isolation, are beginning to communicate and network. Contact engenders friction, and that’s a good thing. Distributed networks create distributed spheres of influence, which undermine market and ideological entrenchments. The wheels have been set in motion, indeed started turning over 50 years ago. It remains to be seen how things will shake out. We’ll see changes in patterns of patronage, in venues for exhibition and distribution, and in the critical infrastructure that weaves these trends into viable narratives.

In the late 1980s Robert Hughes, writing as chief art critic for Time magazine, wrote that the artworld was becoming more decentralized. He suggested that the structure of that world, and its patterns of influence, more closely resembled that of the Medieval City States rather than the supremely dominant Rome of the Caesars or Paris in the early Modern period. Emergent technologies and social networks will make this decentralization even more granular. Because of the nature of the work, Realists tend to be more closely aligned, more symbiotic with the communities where they reside. This latter development will be all the more welcome as it supplants the image of the artist as a global dilettante effecting grand but empty gestures for an increasingly novelty-besotted public. Perhaps then a model for an engaged art appropriate to modern democracies can emerge.

David Hettinger, Nude, oil on canvas

I ran across this image of a painting by David Hettinger, an accomplished Realist who lives in Illinois. I was immediately struck by the fact that the model’s pubes are “trimmed”, something that seems to immediately qualify the work as being “of the moment.” It reminded me of a series of drawings that I saw in the early 1980s at Vose Galleries in Boston, a series of nudes by William McGregor Paxton. The figures, all female, were pretty conventional save for the fact that they all wore high heels. These were done probably a few decades before the famed Vargas Girls graced the pages of Playboy magazine.

It started me thinking about the ambiguous relationship between nudity and sexuality in art. After all, the figures from the Classical period were usually devoid of pubes at all, and it was said that the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin had his marriage to Effie Gray annulled on the grounds that her having pubic hair was a deformity. This story is obviously apocryphal, but telling nonetheless with regards to our cultural history.

Hettinger himself, in the facebook caption that accompanies this painting, says “So many times my models take better poses on breaks than I set up to paint that I just began painting when the first break came.” I believe this may result because we impose fewer preconceptions on the model during her break than when we are posing her according to our wishes. Our paintings come closer to a reportage of the facts rather than a construction of them. Such reportage allows the unexplored extension of reality to enter the painting, and helps to weave a larger and more universal narrative than we would be capable of ourselves.

This is perhaps the consequential difference between Hettinger’s painting and those drawings of Paxton. One has to doubt that Hettinger ordered his model to shave her pubes. She did it on her own, perhaps for reasons of hygiene, more likely grooming herself for a lover. The artist could have painted the missing hair but chose not to, letting our attention and imagination fall where they will. In Paxton’s case one has the impression that the artist was working out his own fetishistic inclinations, and the result comes off as being a bit cheezy.

I often tire of looking at images of models posed in studio settings, there being no reference to an experience beyond the tedium of work. I am usually less forgiving of the same bored models arranged in an elaborate Classical tableau referencing some allegory or myth. One can too easily imagine the nudes stripped of their lush background foliage, returned to their origins of sagging model stand, tattered and musty old drapes and suspended plumbob. I’d like to see more of these casual narratives such as David Hettinger has provided here, done while the model was distracted and concerned with something other than holding her pose.

A case can still be made that the figurative work produced at that time presented the most challenging critique of contemporary visual culture then available. There is no doubt that the movement, such as it was, has bifurcated and grown, spawning many different sub-movements and recombinant variations. Much of this has taken place in somewhat isolated enclaves, where the artists have proceeded with their respective cultural labors unaware of much of the work of their peers. This critical and infrastructural blackout has itself played a substantial role in the development of figurative and realist styles in the last quarter of the 20th and first few years of the 21st centuries. Some artists have become even more deliberately isolated, in an attempt to recreate the support mechanisms and training methodologies of the latter part of the 19th century, in some cases adopting similar historical and lexical affectations. Others have been content to view figuration as simply an extension of abstraction, emphasizing formal qualities over cultural meanings, and downplaying referential content. These two factions share much more in common than their adherents realize.

Plein air painting has also enjoyed a resurgence in tandem with these other developments, and plein air societies have sprung up all over the country. For the most part these pleinairistas eschew the rigor and discipline of the ateliers, and their numbers are comprised primarily of amateurs. They provide an enthusiastic audience for workshops and paint-outs offered by various professional artists. Many of these latter are drawn from the ranks of disaffected commercial illustrators.

For a lack of meaningful narratives of the immediate past, many younger artists have plowed the soil of historical influence, seemingly unaware that the same ground was turned a scant 20 years before, by other artists that have since moved on. In art such apprenticeships to history are necessary, essential to both technical and philosophical development. But because of the discontiguous and regionally isolated nature of the figurative community, few tentative steps beyond this apprenticeship are initiated. Hence we have artists that are content to mimic the styles of particular 19th century academics, or the mannered brushstrokes of their favorite impressionists.

Such strategies for survival and support work effectively within the smaller and localized art worlds that have engendered them. In some cases, such as the extended Post-Gammellian atelier movement, an isolated and self-reinforcing critique has created what can best be called a mutual admiration society. Here claims of self-importance stand in inverse proportion to any larger social relevance.

Elevated to a national or international stage, the provincialism of these various movements becomes painfully obvious. Much of this myopic provincialism is a direct result of a lack of intergenerational and intra-movement communication and dialogue, itself a byproduct of the failure to overcome the cultural inertias that Crane chronicles in her study. The reasons for this inertia are manifold and complex, and depend as much on market deliberations as happenstance. However, there are signs that these circumstances are about to change. New modes of communication and social networking have made the world much smaller, and thrust many of these artists and groups into a much larger arena. It is an arena where, because of new media, methodologies and aesthetic assumptions can be readily tested and compared. Some of the artists that have been tapping a figurative or realist vein will prove more resilient than others. My guess is that this will not be a function of technical prowess, but rather a reflection of their depth of humanity and experience. And in the final analysis, this is as it has always been, and as it should be.

LITTLE FOOTPRINTS, Don Ealy, oil on canvas, 16 X 20, ©2007

My friend the painter Don Ealy passed away on Sunday. I met Don when I was a pre-teen. He was married to my sister Marcia’s best friend, Mary “Babe” (Alward) Ealy, and Don had been close to Marcia’s first husband, the painter John Thamm. I recall visiting Don and Babe’s place on 7th in Spokane, just East of the downtown area.

I occasionally saw them on infrequent trips to Spirit Lake, where they have lived for the last several decades. Don painted in a little studio behind their house. It was full of canvases and coffee cans half filled with turpentine, a real painter’s studio. He loved to paint, and he loved to talk about painting. He was an extremely warm person. Once I ran into him, after not seeing him for many years, at Davidson Galleries where I was showing. He seemed to pick up our conversation where we had last left it, and it was as if I had just seen him the day before.

SITTING IN THE SAND, Don Ealy, oil on canvas, 7 X 5, ©undated

I don’t know a great deal about Don’s background. He had studied with Herman Keys, a prominent figurative painter who had made his home in Spokane, WA. Don grew up in Spokane, and studied at Eastern Washington University and Washington State University. He studied painting privately in the U.S. and Europe. He served in the Navy. He had a long exhibition history, and recently had significant success at Christopher Queen Galleries, in Duncans Mills, California, and at The Art Spirit Gallery of Fine Art, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Don was an accomplished musician and played many instruments, but favored his guitar and violin. He loved to talk about art, music and politics. He was a pacifist, and did not believe that disputes could be effectively resolved by war.

BLACK BOAT, Don Ealy, oil, 9 X 12, ©2006

WINTER 06/07, Don Ealy, oil on canvas, 16 X 20, ©2007

UNTITLED, John Asaro, o/c, 40 X 32 in., 2007

I was thumbing through a new issue of Art In America when I happened upon a full page ad with a photograph of a grinning artist standing in front of a large painting of three swimming female nudes. The painting looked interesting, and the ad copy read “Figure painter with large body of work seeking new representation in spacious gallery. New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.” The ad included the usual contact info: website, email, phone, in that order.

I have to say that I found this ad interesting on a number of levels. Art in America is usually devoid of anything of real interest to a painter, and this copy was not different in that respect. I wondered why an artist with such an evident level of accomplishment would have to spend several thousand dollars in an attempt to interest a gallery in his work. The more I looked at the ad, the more ambivalent my feelings became. Why only New York, Los Angeles or Chicago? The painting itself seemed to be very vigorously painted, but brought to mind the paintings by David Hockney of swimming figures with submerged distortions. And something about the grinning countenance of the artist reminded me of a painting by Richard Dadd, one of his “Watercolors to Illustrate the Passions” titled “Want the Malingerer.” In Dadd’s painting the viewer is looking down a long road leading into the city. A group of beggars, including a dog with a pewter cup in its mouth, are leering out at the viewer from the left edge of the road. Their grinning faces reek of desperation.

I logged onto John Asaro’s website, where I discovered that he “had been contemplating painting exclusively the female figure,” but “for one reason or another, the timing was never right.” I also discovered that he intended to “spend the next 20 years working on this theme.” The paintings themselves, at first look, had a certain sensual appeal. The figures were either alone or grouped in almost serial arrangements against flat garish backgrounds. The anticipated flesh tones gave way to the bright candy colors of taffy and cake frosting, the strong cast shadows were painted in saturated complimentary hues. The figures themselves looked like those that you might see in an instructional manual for illustration from the forties, say by Andrew Loomis for instance. A few paintings seemed to have an almost sinister narrative subtext: A limp and unconscious woman being held aloft by disembodied hands; a woman strung up by her ankles, carnally writhing as blood drips from the wound at her throat. The latter painting is titled IRAQ, in case you doubted that the artist was a serious person with something to say.

I did a Google search on the artist’s name, and discovered that he was the same painter responsible for other advertisements I had seen, of figures walking on the beach, tending flowers or leaning languidly against window sills. The style was in deliberate emulation of Joachim Sorolla, with a hint of that artist’s sprezzatura, or studied casualness. The beach scenes, were especially reminiscent of that great Spanish Impressionist. The newer works brought to mind another artist; Andy Warhol, for his garish and arbitrary color, serial imagery, flat graphic representation and explicit relationship to illustration. Another illustrator, Peter Max, emulated this same master in very similar ways when he tried to shed the stigma of his own commercial past. In fact it seems that when any figurative painter wants to suddenly gain acceptance in the overheated blue chip market for modernist and post-modernist works, they do portraits (Max) or figures (Jenny Savile), or old Underwood typewriters (Robert Cottingham) painted starkly against these same flat brightly colored backgrounds. Add a smattering of seemingly random and spontaneous squiggly brushsrokes (also reminiscent of Warhol and Max) and you’ve pretty much got the formula.

I looked again at the Art In America ad, and then the website. My friend Wm Dubin commented “he either has to clean them up or dirty them up. They are too much IN-BETWEEN right now. They remind me of Mel Ramos women distilled through Oskar Kokoschka…..” The problem with these works for me could be stated in simpler terms. They are all dressed up with no place to go. I suddenly, and sadly, realized that this artist was making his big play.