Center City Whirl

Mangel Gallery: The serene lyricism of Will Barnet has appealed to me ever since I gave my daughter Cathy a girl and cat print of his twenty years ago. Strangely, I had never seen a lot of his stuff together, and frankly I was a little edgy about his being just on the edge of kitsch, perhaps just a little too pat in his benign domesticity, and surely he is quite repetitive. Not to worry. He’s no major artist, but he does what he’s been doing for sixty years with conviction and panache.
 
His charcoal “Midnight” (1985) is a caring madonna quieting her child against the backdrop of a many paned window opening onto giant conifers. His pastel “Madonna of the Garden” (1985) takes the duo outside where she’s teaching a somewhat older child how to love being read to. Her pink gown and black hair play off soothingly to the tan cat with a smoothly curved tail. “Midnight” has the calming sinuosity of the mother’s swooping white sleeve.
 
“The Reader / Diva When Young” (1979) is rich chromatically, with a deep maroon blanket highlighted by tan, light blue, and brown vertical striped wallpaper, with the swirl this time being the raven tresses of the comfortably reclining young woman. It’s a formula, but I like it! A small world, lovingly rendered.
 
Arts & Antiques for March 1987 has an interesting piece on his commissioned portraits (which start at 50 G’s!; prints are more modest at $1-8; drawings $5-12; and paintings $20-65). “When I was 12,” WB recalls, “I discovered one of Rembrandt’s portraits; it wasn’t just a painting, it was a memory of a person.” His remind me of Japan more.
 
Moore College of Art: “Joyce Kozloff: Visionary Ornament” (through April 19) is one of those rare cultural events—don’t miss. I haven’t been so elated since beginning to track down Louis Sullivan’s masterpieces twenty-five years ago. Public art, in my opinion, is rotten with pompous narcissism, punishing us for every Minute Man of a Village Green with an equally indestructible Richard Serra mucking up somebody’s lunch. (Korten steel has a further disadvantage of protecting itself with its own rust; you can’t even look forward to its self-destructing.) Kozloff has found a way to be brilliantly original yet unswervingly faithful to the public artist’s responsibility to please the common viewer without stooping condescendingly.
 
Her great epiphany began in Mexico in 1973 when she noted that indigenous pretechnological cultures do not exhaust typology with representation and abstraction. She found the glories of ornament in the Third World, often simply as an outcome of the tools and materials available but nonetheless repeated enough to become a tradition.

As I type this, my eye looks up to my Divorce Pots, two pieces I picked after listening to a Spanish decree of dissolution in Juarez. One is horizontally banded with a delectable lack of perfect symmetry; the other is a gourd shaped with vertical deeply incised fluting on a black ground. After twenty years, still ravishing. Analogously, Kozloff started making ceramic tiles that pick up the imagery of a locale—quilts, gravestones, flora of New England for Harvard Square subway station.
 
Senecan Indian and Art Deco for the new Buffalo subway, an “illumination” of a “D” for Detroit’s People Mover station in the Financial District—with bears chasing bulls’ tails in an endless fiscal frolic.
 
Kozloff’s curiosity about art history is on a constant cruise for apposite imagery—it results in knockouts like her Galla Placida in the Philadelphia Suburban Station restoration. Her pilasters (of tiles, grout, and plywood) are, simply, to avoid supererogatory analysis, enchanting. Likewise with her King Tut wallpaper. She is playful and witty as in her “East meets West meets East meets West” romp blending chinoiserie from the Brighton Pavilion with arabesqueries form the Great Mosque at Cordoba.
 
The Age of Individualist Arrogance is over. If we’re lucky, the future of public art belongs to environmentalist landscape reclaimers like Harriet Feigenbaum (PAFA last fall showed a ridge worth of her mountainsides of projects and plans) and icebearers like Joyce Kozloff. Trying to please the public and repair out collective earlier mistakes is not a trivial posture to take—only the callow narcissists of Counter-Philistinism try to live that way.

The squalor of our public places needs more than the social therapy of the Anti-Graffiti Network (though it sure enough needs that as well); they need redeeming. As I see pages from Kozloff’s notebooks chockablock with mnemonic sketches of Frank Furness, I thrill to the possibilities that our city will be renewed still more by her prodigious knowledge and skill. If there’s one show not to miss in your lifetime, it’s JK’s “Visionary Ornament.” She’s a William Blake for our dark Satanic milltown.
 
Reprinted from Art Matters, April 1987