Richard Schmid, "Nancy and Rose at the Met"
If John Singer Sargent had just painted the popular Spanish dancer, Carmen Dauset, in 2018 it’s not likely it would be shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, as it was in the same year it was painted, 1890. It’s way too outdated. But is it really? Aren’t contemporary viewers still thrilled by this poised young woman with the arched eyebrows, ruby red lips, and ornate, billowing gold and silver skirt? Isn’t that why the Art Institute is showing posters of this painting all over the city to attract visitors to the special Sargent exhibit now on view? Many professional artists continue to produce similarly attractive, upbeat works with more or less success. Why won’t major American museums – even the ones that claim to be encyclopedic-- ever select the very best contemporary examples of this genre for display? Perhaps the dichotomy between avant garde and kitsch has not yet been retired. We can just note that this kind of painting has its own collectors, galleries, and pantheon of celebrated practitioners, including Chicago born artist and teacher, Richard Schmid. (b. 1934). His pieces now sell into the low six figures.
The Schmid paintings in this show are not among his very best – but they do display some of his characteristic qualities. There is a precision in the layered application of brush strokes and a control of pictorial space with edges sharp or soft. There is a calligraphic intensity to the designs, and his brush always seems to have carried just the right amount of paint. His work has breezy lightness and charm rather than the power and glory of earlier masters – but isn’t that more appropriate for our less heroic age? In contrast to the slow, meticulous French atelier approach that has had such a resurgence over the past thirty years, Schmid cultivates spontaneity. As in Chinese brush painting, a rapid, alla prima execution demands a thoroughly developed, methodical process - a process which the artist has presented in over a dozen books and videos published over the past four decades. Wherever he has lived around the country, he has attracted and instructed groups of devoted students.
This exhibit also includes the current work of six of the painters who studied with him in Chicago thirty years ago. All of them have gone in their own, sometimes quite different directions. As once featured in the National Portrait Gallery, Rose Frantzen has specialized in portraits of her neighbors in Maquoketa, Iowa. In this show she offers a wall-sized critique of modern urban life from a rural, yet not conservative, point of view. Why are Christian folks carrying guns in the street and why are black people so often their targets? Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon travel together around the world, giving painting workshops and depicting local color. They both seem to prefer the brash discordance and thick paint of Russian masters like Philip Malyavin.
Romel De La Torre’s tropical sensuality seems to come from an entirely different world of sensibility - yet his portraits follow Schmid’s practice of placing a precisely drawn face against a tempestuous background of expressive brush strokes. Likewise the portraits of Clayton Beck - though the facial expressions that Beck depicts do not flatter the model. He’s more of a realist than any of the other former students. His nudes have have a brute fleshiness much closer to Thomas Eakins than William Bouguereau.
How do these twenty-first century figurative painters compare with Sargent, Zorn, Chase, and the other painters of the Gilded Age now showing at the Art Institute? It does seem that the pieces on display compare better with the magazine illustrators of that earlier era - appealing to a general audience rather than meeting the aesthetic demands of those familiar with great painting. Such a comparison is not really fair, however, since the Art Institute can pick and choose pieces from museums around the country, including its own extensive collection, -- while the small art club that has assembled this show can only exhibit whatever each artist was willing to send. If you look online, for example, you will find several powerful portraits by Nancy Guzik that offer much more than the painfully sentimental depiction of a child that was sent to Chicago.
The exceptional pieces in this show are the small nudes executed by Clayton Beck and Romel De La Torre. They may exemplify the conventional male gaze - but heterosexual male eyes will probably always be fascinated by nubile flesh, and these artists have transformed that desire into fully realized arrangements of line and color.
No comments:
Post a Comment