Meeting My Spirit Guide at The Art Show
The world is really full of friends you haven't met...
This week, the Scholar Wife took The Middlebrow to see The 2024 Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. I recommend her essay about the experience, where she chronicles her seduction by the work of Bernice Bing. Along the lines of Bing’s reinvigoration of the Spanish Baroque, we visited a booth devoted to the artists Jeannie Reynal and Thomas Sills, a couple who met in New York, married in Mexico and spent time working in Russia, Turkey, Greece and Italy during the 1950s and 60s. There’s clearly more to that story and I sense it’s an untold Reds and definitely want to know more.
I met Ralf C. Nemec, owner of the world’s largest collection of Rockwell Kent prints. Who is Rockwell Kent? I only found out by meeting Nemec, who takes his collection of Kent’s landscapes and slice of life paintings, made mostly between 1920-1950 around the country where, Nemec assures me, they draw interested and excited audiences. Nemec has devoted substantial resources and time to making sure that Kent has a legacy and that his work finds the eyes that seek it. That seems like a life well-lived to me.
We had recently seen Edges of Ailey at The Whitney, which is the best curated museum show I have attended in a very long time, reviewed here by The Scholar Wife. At one of the video stations, I was entranced by a long wine and smoke-fueled conversation about life in 1950s Paris between the choreographer Alvin Ailey, writer James Baldwin and painter/collagist Romare Bearden. We encountered a Bearden at one booth and it was delightful for me to be able to make the connection as my journey into appreciating contemporary fine art continues.
Another connection was made at the CANADA booth, where an exhibit by artist Xylor Jane evokes and advances the work of Piet Mondrian, subject of a new biography by Nichola Fox Weber. I’ve just started reading Weber’s garrulous story of Mondrian’s life and am eager to learn more about how an abstract artist with clean lines and an eye for color could have his name attached to every post 1950s apartment building and hotel that sold itself on aesthetics as lifestyle. I’ll be watching for more by Xylor Jane as well as her work does seem to preserve and extend his achievements.
Finally, I met Lulu. I figure that this is why I was meant to attend the event. M. Louise Stanley (aka Lulu) has been painting since the 1960s and makes her subjects a combination of regular life, mythology, politics and satire. We were grabbed immediately by her painting “Jupiter and Io,” which shows the king of all gods from Greek and Roman mythology emerging as mist from a woman’s iron, to seduce her and to completely disrupt her life when Jupiter’s jealous wife turns her into a heifer. Stanley’s painting is a modern take on a Renaissance classic by Antonio da Correggio.
Lulu and I discussed mythology, her life in a California artist’s colony and the plays of Alfred Jarry. Seeing her work reminded me of the recent joy I’d experienced watching the musical Hadestown and it also reminded me of a script I’d read that’s a modern adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Mac Wellman and Len Jenkin, where the myths are all reset in a contemporary and corrupt Florida city ruled by capricious gods who transform mortals into objects like living lawn furniture.
Mythology is one of my most enduring obsessions and I recently picked up a copy of Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By, which is based on a series of (free!) lectures the scholar delivered at New York City’s Cooper Union in the 1960s and 1970s. How the human experience remains constant despite changes in technology, the economy, politics and fashion always amazes, even as I learn to recognize the patterns.
Sometimes, in a very commercial society, it can seem like few people care much about literature, art and myth. Meeting Lulu reminds me that even when I feel alone with such thoughts that there are people out there just as interested, just as devoted, and creating wonderful art that makes the world better.
If you’re in New York and can get to The Art Show, it’s worth your time before November 2nd. This visit will stay with me for a long time.