R.H. Ives Gammell at the Maryhill Museum - Goldendale, Wash - Brief Article

Academically trained and inclined, Boston painter R.H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981) was resolutely out of step with his times. Vehemently antimodern, he devoted his considerable resources to preserving a tradition embraced by the 19th-century artists he adored, pompiers like William Bouguereau and Jean-Leon Gerome. This retrospective featured realistic portraits, still lifes and landscapes, which showed off Gammell's craftsmanship but were dramatically overshadowed by his amazing multifigure salon machines. The latter, biblical and mythological paintings replete with Orientalist fantasy, are both impressive and disturbing. Stagy, full of histrionics and not a little bombast, they drew scorn from Gammell's critics in the 1930s. But the artist believed this type of "imaginative painting" to be his most important endeavor.

He was a devotee of opera and listened to Wagner for inspiration. Another influential source (though undocumented) must have been Hollywood. Gammell saw the Bible through the eyes of Caravaggio, Gerome and Cecil B. DeMille. His naked Bathsheba of 1931 stands with eyes modestly downcast before a backdrop of the Holy Land, but with her hip-shot pose and arms raised to adjust her turban, she resembles a movie-star pinup as much as a Jewess at her mikvah. In the ambitious Song of Lamentation (1938), a chorus of Israelites bewails their Babylonian captivity through expressive music and dance. Although handsome and finely rendered, the 15 costumed figures in their historicist setting produce an effect of grand melodrama, not epic tragedy.

Reading Jung and James Frazier, Gammell hoped his archaic subjects would have universal relevance. He was desperately concerned with the condition of Western art and civilization, so much so that he suffered a nervous breakdown at the onset of World War II. Thereupon began his most fascinating period, with paintings that seem increasingly visionary and stylistically schizophrenic. His magnum opus, the 23-panel Hound of Heaven (1942-56), traces the vicissitudes of a doubting soul, a nude everyman who variously flees, despairs or exults in timeless mountain or sylvan landscapes. On these fantastic scenes, Gammell inscribed cryptic symbols: a Noh mask, a scarab, Hebrew letters, heraldic or masonic elements that transcend any specific culture. Opaque and flat, the floating motifs cancel the otherwise illusionistic space of Gammell's pictures, just as in the psychotic Leviathan (ca. 1980), in which a cartoony serpent unfurls across the surface of a convincingly painted ocean complete with sea monster.

It's as if the evil modernism Gammell had repressed emerges insidiously in his late work to haunt his own anachronistic program.

["Transcending Vision: R.H. Ives Gammell" travels to the Guild of Boston Artists; the Cape Museum of Fine Art, Dennis, Mass. (May 18-July 17); and the Blackburn Museum, England.]

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group