Coney Island apocalypse: drawing on world history and his own American childhood, figurative painter Arnold Mesches has long combined a collage-based esthetic with expressionist color and classically inspired compositions. A traveling show focuses on his "Anomie" series, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the 20th century

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

Now that the 20th century is behind us, efforts are emerging to make some sense of its bewildering combination of tragedy, villainy, progress, hope and failure. The best of them may be those that acknowledge how events experienced close-up are far more turbulent and uncertain than they seem through the filter of history. Last spring, in a thought-provoking show curated by Sandra Olsen for the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, N.Y. (an expanded version of a traveling exhibition that originated at the Oregon Jewish Museum, where it was curated by Gerry Snyder), painter Arnold Mesches suggested one way to come to grips with it all. Now 77, Mesches has been a participant in or an observer of events for more than half of the last century. By drawing on the lives of his parents and grandparents, he is able to cast his vision back another 50 years. He has turned his experiences into a visual chronicle that is at once intensely personal and immediately recognizable.

The core of the show was a selection of paintings from Mesches's "Anomie" series, which grapples with over 500 years of world history. These were supplemented by other canvases that look at larger events through the prism of Mesches's family history. In all these works, the artist brings a novelist's sweep to his ruminations on what was once optimistically named the Century of Progress. And, as in the best historical novels, history is experienced simultaneously on many levels, from the actions of great nations to the failure of a dry goods store in a small town in upstate New York and how it affects a struggling Lithuanian immigrant.

The "Anomie" paintings--the artist defines anomie as "a condition of society marked by the absence of moral standards"--were installed salon style in the museum's spacious central gallery. Painted over a nine-year period (1990-1999), they were presented here not in order of their creation but according to the chronological sequence of the events they depict. (The entire series stretches back to Columbus's discovery of America in 1492, but this exhibition focused on the last 100 years.)

While the "Anomie" series is chiefly concerned with world-historical events, the Castellani hanging began on a personal note with Anomie 1910: Family Portrait (1993), in which an image of Mesches's father's family prior to their departure from Lithuania appears against a turbulent sky and a shadowy view of Coney Island. The installation ended with Jet Star 2000 (1994), a dour comment on the future that depicts a colorfully painted majorette and a gaudy amusement park rocket ride amid a bleak landscape of discarded tires and burning buildings. In between were works that referenced everything from the 1920 founding of the League of Nations and the 1929 Wall Street crash to World War II, the Cold War and the uncertain political configurations that have followed.

The paintings that tell this story do not present conventional narratives. Relying on a collage-based esthetic, but generally using only acrylic paint, Mesches creates kaleidoscopic arrangements of scenes and figures in which meaning emerges from webs of associations. That many of the images are obviously derived from vintage photographs adds a layer of remove.

The mood of the works varies considerably. Anomie 1934: Halos, for instance, is an elegiac depiction of some men in 1930s-style work garb carrying another man's limp body. The composition deliberately invokes Titian's Deposition, but the painting is actually based on a photograph taken during the San Francisco longshoremen's strike of 1934. While suggesting a religious dimension, the title also refers to the whirling circle of lights that once emblazoned Coney Island's Luna Park.

Other works are ominous. Anomie 1939: The Black Hole is inspired by the entry of Japan into World War II. A pair of Japanese soldiers stand at attention on either side of the canvas, their arms raised in a military salute. They flank an empty chair draped with a red cloth, a symbol, perhaps, of the absent emperor. Overhead, meteors spin and stars fall as prophecy of the military fireworks to come.

Elsewhere, irony predominates. The interior scene in Anomie 1929: The Lighter centers on a pair of masked revelers (a man and a woman) standing beneath an elaborately framed painting of a raccoon ripping into a fish it has caught. It's hard to miss the visual rhyme between the blood dripping from the raccoon's jaws and a long red scarf draped over the shoulder of the male figure, or the allegorical meaning hinted at in the cigarette the man is about to light: economic conflagration is imminent.

Shifting to a satirical vein, Anomie 1980: Nancy Reagan's Dream replays the absurd combination of ceremonial pomp and New Age superstition that marked the Reagan presidency. The former first lady's face has been inserted into a tableau based on a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. Mesches surrounds the royal party with a canopy of astrological and mythological symbols updated by popular culture. For instance, Bert Lahr, in his Wizard of Oz garb, represents Leo, while Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a beefy Hercules.