“Director’s Choice,” the current exhibition at BigTown Gallery in Rochester, Vt., which has been curated by its director Anni Mackay, is a kind of primer on what it was like to mature artistically in the decades after World War II.
Ira Matteson, represented by works on paper and sculpture, was born in 1917; his late wife Helen Matteson in 1925.
Three of the artists in the show — Varujan Boghosian, Hugh Townley and John Udvardy — came of age during or after the war, and began producing work from the 1950s on. Sculptor Nicholas Santoro, started producing work in the 1960s. Pat dipaula Klein, a textile artist, is in her 60s.
These works don’t have the explosive presence of the Abstract Expressionists whom many have come to associate broadly with post-war American art. The works of Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman heralded in a new age of American experimentation that reached international audiences. But their dominance may have crowded out artists working in a less consciously grandiose vein.
After AbEx, roughly, came Pop Art and Op Art, which mined lowbrow American culture. Innate to both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, I think, was a kind of machismo, followed by the cooler irony of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
There are, of course, numerous exceptions, but art history and criticism routinely paid court to the famous names. Then came a slew of “isms”: the concrete art of Jasper Johns, minimalism, conceptualism.
However, as more attention is paid by critics and the academy to other American artists working from the 1940s through the 1980s — artists of color, women — a different picture is emerging.
It wasn’t all AbEx or Pop Art (although there were women and artists of color in those genres, too) and it wasn’t all coming out of the New York gallery or museum scene.
Rather like the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover imagining a Manhattanite’s hazy view of the U.S. beyond the Hudson River, New York’s dominance in the past overshadowed the contributions of artists in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and other cities and towns to the American art scene. And perception that New York was the only source of innovation has tended to skew the way we understand the American art scene.
During their careers, Boghosian, Townley, Ira Matteson and Udvardy, for example, have all taught art at such institutions as Dartmouth College, Kent State College, Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, Cooper Union and Pratt Institute.
They’ve exhibited at, and been represented by, galleries throughout the country, but the fact that they were somewhat removed from the New York art scene may have kept them from achieving the kind of fame that a Pollock or a Louise Bourgeois did — if that is what they sought.
On the other hand, with a degree of isolation, and a stable income, comes independence. In looking at this exhibition, you have the sense of artists who did exactly what they wanted, outside the demands and trends of the art market.
We also see artists eschewing “isms.” The process of working out ideas seems to be the point. These are subtler, more personal, less obviously showy pieces than you’d find in Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art, but they’re still highly accomplished.
They compel you to think about how they were made, what they were made from, and how they engage with the space around them. You weren’t there to witness a work’s evolution, but you can sense how it might have gone.
All the works in the show are “finished,” of course, but as you walk around or near them, and look at them up close and from a distance, the means, in a sense, become the end.
In his Figure Relief Series, Thetford artist Ira Matteson carves out of plywood rough, expressive, three-dimensional wall-reliefs that show a woman standing and reclining.
Within each piece of wood, Matteson has carved or sawn out different planes, so that one part of the body emerges toward the viewer, while another part of the body recesses. From one angle, the pieces might look sharp and angular, from another, rounder and softer. Matteson has taken care not to polish off the rougher edges or to make the pieces look too perfect.
He is also represented in the show by large rubbings, in blue and black, of wood grain on special paper. The look of the wood’s grain—perhaps tree rings or bark—against granular paper is richly textured. Again, you think about process: the development of the structure of a tree, and the development of the art that came from the development of the tree.
In her work, Helen Matteson, who died in 2011, painted smaller, almost transparent watercolors of circles, spirals and snaking shapes that are reminiscent of the works of American Arthur Dove and European painters Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky.
What stands out are the elegant precision and control she brings to watercolors that may look straightforward on the surface but gain in depth the more you examine them. There’s a tension between what she took away or omitted in terms of color or space, and what she retained. So what looks like stillness is quite dynamic when you look closely.
Nicholas Santoro, a West Rutland sculptor, uses Vermont marble and Indiana limestone to carve biomorphic shapes that seem both male and female, natural and manmade, soft and hard. The shapes seem to have emerged naturally from the stone, as if Santoro had guided them into the light and air. As with Ira Matteson’s work, you feel the artist collaborating with the material to create something elemental, rather than imposing a structure on it.
Udvardy, a professor emeritus at RISD, is represented both by freestanding and wall sculptures, and multimedia works.
His online biography notes that in addition to studying art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yale University, he supported himself as a younger artist by working in a steel factory, the railroad, a snap factory and a spindle shop in Ohio, Connecticut and New York, respectively.
That on-the-job education must have found its way into his art, because the work on view here suggests spindles, bolts and rails: things that connect to other things and are of use, but also have their own innate, not beauty, but rough magnetism.
In other works, he paints repurposed cardboard boxes and opens them up, and incorporates holes and circles into his relief sculptures which you can look through. The eye is led from one space, and one world, into another.
Townley, who died in 2008 at age 85, taught for many years at Brown University before moving to Bethel in the late 1980s. He primarily worked in wood, whether that was plywood or mahogany, and drew on the art and iconology of India and Native Americans.
In the relief sculpture Michigan Avenue, Townley cuts small square insets out of plywood, and in those insets he carves or inserts such icons as stars, trees and something that looks like a finely-toothed comb. It’s like looking at an old-fashioned quilt made from wood.
Pennsylvania artist Pat dipaula Klein uses crewel embroidery to “paint” in thread, a technique I’ve seen pop up more frequently in work throughout the region. The handwork to make similarly-colored thread pool, run and drip as if it were paint is meticulous, and the result are shapes that glow. Klein’s linen canvases, with their abstracted creatures and insects that seem to fly and hop, have a whimsical feel.
Looking at Varujan Boghosian’s collages, which use images collected from a wide range of such sources as magazines, books and advertising, you see a streak of Surrealism, in which image is layered on image with the weird but unassailable logic of dreams. He has an uncanny gift of knowing how to piece together his cut-out images so that they tell a new story.
“Director’s Choice” continues at BigTown Gallery in Rochester, Vt., through July 9.
Openings and Receptions
The Main Street Museum of Art in White River Junction hosts artist and writer Daisy Rockwell on Saturday with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m. The occasion is an exhibition of “Odalesque and Other Recent Paintings.” A granddaughter of Norman Rockwell, and a former Lebanon resident, she lives in western Massachusetts. On her website, Rockwell notes that her grandfather made “ordinary situations iconic,” while Rockwell’s spin is to make the iconic ordinary. Rockwell will also read from some of her recent translations and fiction. Donations are suggested at the door: $2-$20. For information call 802-356-2776 or email info@mainstreetmuseum.org. Or go to the website, mainstreetmuseum.org.
Of Note
Two Rivers Print Studio is offering an etching workshop from April 30 through May 1 with Lynn Newcomb. The class runs from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. both days. The cost is $195, with an additional materials fee. To register, call 802-295-5901 or email trps@sover.net. Go to tworiversprintmaking.org for further information.
A reminder that AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon begins previewing its Silent Auction, which includes a variety of work by local artists, this Saturday. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Also going up for sale are vintage posters from the collection of longtime AVA supporter Al Quirk.The gallery offers extended hours on Monday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday, March 31 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The auction and party take place on Saturday, April 2, from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
The admission fee is $25/members; $35/non-members; or $50 at the door. For further information contact the gallery at 603-448-3117 or go to avagallery.org.
Ongoing
Arabella, Windsor. The gallery exhibits works by local artists and artisans in a variety of media including jewelry, oils, acrylics, photography, watercolors, pastels and textiles.
Claremont Opera House. Paintings by David Nelson, a Dublin, N.H., artist, are on view in the exhibition “Art is Visual Philosophy,” in the John D. Bennet Atrium Gallery. The show runs through April 30.
Converse Free Library, Lyme. The paintings of Matthew Greenway are on view until March 31.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon. The photographs of Elliott Burg are on view, as well as works by the Cardigan Mountain Art Association, Greg Hubbard, Wayne King, Jean Gerber and Pamela Tarbell. The works on view can be seen through March.
Howe Library, Hanover. “Route 66 in Oklahoma — What Once Was As it is Now,” a show of photographs by Rich Perry, runs through April 27.
Kilton Public Library, West Lebanon. Art work by Lebanon Middle School students is on view through March 31.
Library Arts Center, Newport. “Selections: Winners from the 2015 Juried Regional Exhibit” runs through April 15.
Long River Gallery and Gifts. The Japanese-inspired works of Kathleen Swift are on view through May 2.
Norwich Public Library. An exhibition of nature photographs by Mary Gerakeris runs through April 29.
OSHER@Dartmouth, Hanover. The street photographs of Jim Lustenader are on view through March. The office is open Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Friday 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Royalton Memorial Library, South Royalton. The art of 36 students from South Royalton School is on view through April 2.
Scavenger Gallery, White River Junction. Works by Stacy Hopkins, Toby Bartles, Lois Beatty and Ria Blaas are on view.
Tunbridge Public Library. “National Park Landscapes: Celebrating National Park Service Centennial 2016,” an exhibition of landscape paintings by Royalton artist Joan Hoffmann, continues through May 12.
White River Gallery, South Royalton. “Lynn Newcomb’s Etchings: The Power of Black Ink; Two Decades of Printmaking” is on view through April.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.