Quita Brodhead at Hollis Taggart and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - New York & Philadelphia - painting retrospective exhibition - Brief Article

Quita Brodhead received this deserved double retrospective on turning 100. While any career spanning 80 years would be hard to summarize, Brodhead's has been strongly marked by her long connection with the Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles. (Hollis Taggart's recent show of Carles's paintings was reviewed in A.i.A., Nov. `00.) Paintings from as early as 1920 and up through 2000 reveal Brodhead as a painter of searching intelligence, with little interest in received forms, who assimilated and ran with her teacher's commitment to composing with color.

In a dark, early portrait of her father, painted during her time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the `20s, she was engaged with Cubist principles in the multiple facial planes. Paintings from the `30s show her to have been an attentive student of Carles, as in floral pieces like Peonies in Upright Vase (ca. 1934), with the vase boldly bisected into red shadow and white highlight, or Nude (1930), with its strong-legged, relaxed female nude gazing at the viewer, her curves echoed by lines of drapery.

A work from the '40s, Nude with Kimono (1946) is marked by the sort of swashbuckling confidence that became a hallmark for Brodhead. Skin colors range from blue and lavender to lemon yellow; the model's face, hair and breasts are carved out with thick, dark outlines and lighter planes, giving them a kind of transparency against the roughly brushed green background. The similarly abstract ed Flowers in a White Vase (1940), which has the feel of a transitional work, sets a profusion of color planes whirling around the central subject, with the flowers morphing into circles and triangles.

During this period, Brodhead showed in New York and elsewhere. Respectful reviews from the time, cited in Barbara Wolanin's catalogue essay for the Hollis Taggart exhibition, are top-heavy with adjectives like "decorative" and "delicate." A woman artist painting bright-hued still lifes and nudes was certainly more vulnerable to such pigeonholing than a man (such as Carles) choosing the same subjects.

Brodhead lived for long periods in Paris, Rome and the Canary Islands in the '50s and '60s, making and showing progressively more abstract work before resettling in the Philadelphia area. A painting such as the large Tenerife (1960-61), with its chaotically conjoining planes of dark bluish purple, sienna and black, shows the artist at the top of her risk-taking game, and bears comparison with the contemporaneous work of, say, Joan Mitchell or Philip Guston. In recent decades, her compositions have become more distilled and iconic, with forms floating on atmospheric grounds. It's time to rescue this artist from the relative obscurity her time consigned her to and give the challenging aspects of her often wildly decorative work their due.

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