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Lisa Montag Brotman at Maryland art place - Baltimore - Brief Article
Art in America, April, 2002 by Joe Shannon
Covering 1977 to the present, Lisa Montag Brotman's exhibition of 17 paintings could have been called a mini-retrospective. Her most important efforts, the girlies--nude, provocative and voluptuous--were well represented.
The plumpish figures are painted with a 15th-century-style gloss, purposely "naive," with a pure Balthusian sexuality. I once wrote that her images are "Lolita wise, authoritatively seductive, there are no victims here." They are always presented in fairly undramatic standard portrait poses. But the weird settings where they abide are not at all standard; here Georgia O'Keeffe, Gustav Klimt and Henri Rousseau meet in chuckling accord.
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Apples Make Me Good-Bad-Good (1982) depicts a sprawling redhead with grayish white skin, legs boldly raised, reclining on a cobalt blue, silk-upholstered couch that looks like an abstracted cat's head. Below this are frothy, bloody pink ostrich feathers reaching and waving. The background consists of apples against a cadmium yellow sky. The nude appears comfortable and safe in this world, but we the viewers had better be careful.
There are lots of fruits and vegetables floating in Brotman's strange backdrops. While apples dominate, there are also carrots, radishes, tulips and lots of cherries. Apples and Eve ... Cherries and hmm? Your guess is as good as mine.
The combination of the virginal and the bold sets these unforgettable nudes to smoldering. In Apples and Eve (2001), a girl stands on a pink marble slab, her shoulders swung boldly back. She stares with a mild insolence. There are three large sweet basil leaves barely covering her plump mons veneris. Behind her, apples and basil fronds float on a dark blue field. She seems a sexy child-woman, bemused and defiant, dominating this riveting icon. This is a mature and culminating painting by an artist who has been astonishingly consistent since the early 1980s when she first developed her hot vision.
The erotic temperature essential to Brotman's strongest work was cooled down considerably during the years her children were coming of age. Her figures were painted in leotards. While as technically competent as any of her paintings, the heat was missing. Well, Apples and Eve attests the fire is back in full blaze.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
