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[[left margin]] May 20 - June 20, 1988 [[/left margin]] Page 6 Hassam Flags at National By GINNIE GARDINER Somewhat neglected in the shadow of deservedly heroic hype cast by the imposing array of works in the Gauguin show are the pearlescent treasures of Childe Hassam's flag paintings (in the East Wing of the National Gallery through July 17th). Some of the best collectors of 19th Century American Art have contributed pieces (21 in total) to this historic show. The exhibition's first and greatest impact is the genius of Hassam's light, so much more eloquently perceived when viewing his painting directly, for the strength of the pigments he used stands strongly on the white and beige grounds of his primed Belgian linens. In "Lincoln's Birthday" (c.1918), the flag of the City of New York is brilliantly backlit with rich vertical strokes of cadmium yellow deep and cadmium orange medium. In "Red Cross Drive May, 1928," the horizontal reflections of light and color provided by umbrellas produces stirring counterpoint to the draped vertical stripes of the wet flags, painted in luminous blues and reds mixed with zinc and lead whites. In "Allies Day, May 1917," Monet's cathedrals are recalled in the light illuminating Saint Thomas's Episcopal Church, the University Club, the Gotham Hotel and the Firth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Also, the composition is the most daring and dramatic of all flag paintings. Both compositionally and in his brushstroke, Hassam addresses universal themes. Catalogue and exhibition notes speak of the important political statements the artist documented vis-a-vis United States support of the European war effort. Even more than this, however, this artist's vision conveys the intensity of emotions that were raging in the reverberant rhythms of his colors and strokes. In "Victory Won," (c. 1919), the display of victory flags echoes abstractly the regimentation of parades. Not a brushstroke or color marches out of step with the procession of images organized in his predominantly diagonal composition. Hassam's facile but forceful vertical brushstrokes in most of his handling of the skies were directly inspired by the vertical stroking of the flags. The flags permit loose energetic brushwork throughout the canvas because they provide a sufficient compositional anchor. Just as Jasper Johns began in commercial art and was therefore keenly aware of flags' potential for bold graphic beauty, so did Hassam, in his progression from illustrator to mast oil painter, exploit the abstract graphic play learned in his earliest flag studies. He also extended his vocabulary of marks, first in his already mentioned sky treatments, and later through the use of such earthly elements as crowds in the rain under the protective parabolas of their umbrellas, which in Hassam's shorthand were transformed into abstract marks creating the horizontals in many of his paintings. Art/World News Washington, D.C. - A reciprocal exhibition of approximately 185 works by three distinguished contemporary Soviet artists will be on view through June 5 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Organized by The Academy of the Arts of the U.S.S.R., the exhibition features works in oil, watercolor, wood-block printing and other media by Boris Ugarov, Tair Salakhov, and Dmitri Bisti, and is an exchange for the exhibition organized by the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., "An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art" which opened in Leningrad and Moscow in 1987 and was on view at the Corcoran Gallery in the summer of 1987. HOME DELIVER You can receive each issue of ART/WORLD at home, easily, by filing out this subscription blank and mailing it to ART/WORLD, 1295 Madison Ave. 10128 [[image of a woman riding a bike and delivering copies of ART/WORLD]] Name Address City, State, Zip Please send me a: 4 Year Subscription $80 2 Year Subscription $40 1 Year Subscription $20 ART?WORLD publishes the best reporting and clearest analysis of the most important art events, each month, while they are still viewable. L.I. LETTER Continued from Page 1 the Queens Museum - would you believe it? - has a permanent exhibition of plaster casts of statues from ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance. And there he stayed, sulking, till I had finished looking at the contemporary art. I mean I only went to the exhibition because I thought it would please George. I myself had a lot of misgivings. I was afraid it would all be like Carlo Maria Mariani - you know, marzipan fantasies of ancient Greek life that look like they were painted by some especially soupy pupil of Ingres - or even worse, like Lincoln Perry, whose figures are more like wood than marzipan, but I was wrong, thank Heaven. There was only one teeny tiny Mariani, and no Lincoln Perry at all. Instead, the exhibition included all kind of mainstream modern artists like Arman, Audrey Flack, Paul Georges and George Segan that you never, ever think of as classical. In fact, the only thing that was classical about most of the works was a part - sometimes a very small part - of the imagery. Take, for instance, Arman's "Venus, Varium et Mutabile." You might expect of Arman that he would take ten thousand peanut sized Venus de Milos and put them all jumbled up together in a plexiglass frame, but no. Instead he took a largish bronze cast of Venus and and sliced it vertically into four pieces. Wasn't that a clever idea? According to Barbara C. Matilsky, director of the exhibition, he did it to layer its levels of perception. And then there is Audrey Flacks' "Islandia, Goddess of the Healing Waters." Since the last time I saw her work, Ms. Flack has stopped being a Photo Realist painter and become a New Age Sculptor - or do you say sculptress? I get so confused trying to figure out the Liberated things to say. Anyway, "Islandia" is a five-foot tall statue of an energetic and determined winged woman dressed like the Venus de Milo and wearing flowers in her hair. The anatomy is carefully studied from life, which is not a very classical thing to do, and except for her hairdo and profile you would hardly call her classical at all, for her wings are gilded and her robe is tinted the sweetest baby blue, lavender and dusty orange, and she has glitter on the flowers in her hair, just like the statuettes you used to be able to buy in the ten -cent store. But classical or not, "Islandia" is wonderful. She is a goddess of our own dear Long Island, who offers the spark of creativity to all who come to her, and although I read in Architectural Digest that dear Ms. Flack doesn't actually live on Long Island, like I do, she just summers and weekends here, she has certainly captured the inspiration it offers. George Segal's classicism is a little more what you might expect from him. I mean it is surprising that he made a plaster cast from a live model posed like the Venus de' Medici, because he usually makes plaster casts of people on their way to the subway. But his Venus has lots of real-life bulges and creases, and in fact she is just like one of his weary pedestrians, excepts for the nudity and the fact that she has no arms, legs or head. Paul Georges also does what you expect of him. On a canvas as large as a wall that looks like it was painted in ten minutes flat, he mixes naked figures representing timeless allegory with clothed figures representing present-day reality. His painting is entitled "Perseus Slaying Medusa," and it shows a naked man guided by a naked woman in his effort to plunge a sword into a naked giantess with snakes where her hair should be, while rather sinister looking soldiers in ancient and modern uniforms look on, reminding us that rapine and violence are not just something that you read about in Greek myths, they are actually with us today. The purpose of this exhibition is to show how contemporary artists use classical imagery to express their concerns about modern life, and it certainly does that. I mean George Segal made even Venus look like a sack of potatoes. But the exhibition does more than that - it also proves that Classicism is alive and well today, no matter what Mr. Clement Greenberg and Mr. William Rubin may think, and that anybody can be a classicist, even a Photo-Realist or a Neo-Expressionist, even poor, dear Andy, if he were alive today which is such a relief to know, now that Classicism is the new thing. All you have to do is put a Venus or a Medusa in your work instead of broken plates or a Campbell's Soup can. The one fault I find with the exhibition is that it does not include any photographs. I mean now that photography is recognized as art, every exhibition should include photographs, don't you think" They should have had one of Diane Blell's really amazing tableaux vivants of life in ancient Greece, which look exactly like stills from an unusually well-researched costume movie, or a Garry Winogrand snap of a party at the Met with a bit of classical statuary in the background. Except for this, however, I think "Classical Myth and Image in Contemporary Art" is a really wonderful exhibition, and I can't understand why George hated it so. I mean he keeps going on about the Return to the Eternal Verities, but the minute some really good contemporary artists take on Classical themes, he goes across the hall to the plaster casts. Your art-loving niece, Vickie Lou GAUGUIN Continued from Page 1 under a blue-smalt and cobalt blue sky. The reasons for the respect which this painter's peers had for him becomes self evident. The themes which haunted Gauguin's later work in stylized planes of brilliant colors also make themselves felt in his earlier works. "The Little Dreamer" ("Enfant qui dort, c.1881) for which Aline, the artist's daughter was the unwitting model, is prescient of the tradition of enwombed and vulnerable recumbent Tahitian figures to come. It is as if, through and despite the rigors of observation imposed by the discipline of the impressionists' doctrine, Gauguin's symbolist obsessions would emerge. This painter's friendship with Cezanne, and his fraternity with his stolid genius is evident in the still lifes from the late 1880's in the show. But, in "Portrait of a Woman" (c.1890) were treated to a painting two artists collaborated on and painted together, with the still life in the background (at least) by Cezanne and the figure by Gauguin held rigidly by the rectilinear structure of Cezanne. Practically every concern of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century emerges at some point of Gauguin's explorations. Not only did his work provide a rich vein for his descendants to mine, but his contemporaries and their interests were freely explored and adapted to his purposes. This exhibition makes clear that Gauguin was not simply a painter, he was an industry: A writer, sculptor, and fashioner of exotic objects to be incorporated into his self generated world. Gauguin painted paper fans, and the natural compositional device which they provide became incorporated into the oil paintings they inspired. "In the Waves" a brilliant sea of poisonous Paris green engulfing the fair skin of red-headed Ondine, his model for the piece, was originally composed in this fashion earlier in 1889. In "The Loss of Virginity" (c.1890), not only are the ideas of symbolism and Tahiti transposed upon the French countryside, but you say to yourself, "Eureka! Rousseau!", for the composition, subject and mood are first cousins to this primitive symbolist. The difference? A jackal instead of Rousseau's lion sniffs the virgin's ear. Once this exhibition arrives in Tahiti we are taken through the eyes of this dreamer on the final journeys. The tropical light which he first explored in Martinique (in 1889) is revisited with a brilliance, boldness and clarity that finally arrives at the destination of coupling value changes with hue changes. If you were or are a painter you can't help but feel awe at his breadth of color. Gauguin lived in his fantasy world. He was not a "nice guy". No men lived in Tahiti, according to his bohemian colonialist's view. The Tahitian women, to whom he inscribed the libertine's values matriculated through the romantic spectrum of the myth of the "noble savage", occasionally communicate a hostile, mistrustful gaze which infiltrates the artist's own illusions and impositions of a romantic Catholic/ - cargo cult through the matrix of his talent for accurate observation. But, even if you love to hate what this man provoked himself to symbolize as a myth, you cannot help respecting so much of what he brought to vision and painting. This is an exhibition of innumerable treasures. All the exotic colors which chemistry achieved in the nineteenth century were incorporated by this artist's unquenchable thirst for the brilliant and sensual. If he died still thirsty it was not for want of color and sensation, and even the most exhibition-toughened museum-goer will find this show exhausting in its totality of exploration. Redon At Phillips By HOPE D. BROCK Anyone who visits Washington before June 26th should be sure to go to the Phillips Gallery, America's first museum of modern art, to see the glorious painting of Odile Redon (1840-1916). Born in Bordeaux, Redon first studied architecture but soon turned to art. He was influenced by Delacroix, Corot and Moreau. The first part of his career he crated a believable universe of monsters and mystery in his "black pictures", so much so that he was nicknamed "prince of the dream". He observed, black should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid color of the palette or the prism. Even as his popularity as a "master of blacks" and "decadent rose", Redon began using more color and soon was established as the leading colorist of his day. The floral still-lifes are his best known with his exquisite use of color and tone both in oil and pastel. The Woodner Collection has an abundance of his flower paintings as well as portraits, landscapes and allegorical subjects.