Frank Moore's ecology loss: Moore, who died last year at the age of 48, consistently used his paintings to address personal tragedies and pressing social crises. A recent retrospective helped clarify the artist's place in the larger history of American painting - Critical Essay

I was fortunate to see Frank Moore's posthumous retrospective, "Green Thumb in a Dark Eden," at the second of its two venues, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. It was organized by Sue Scott, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Orlando Museum of Art, where it opened June 8, 2002, some six weeks after the artist's death from AIDS. Although he was born and raised in New York City, Moore felt a special attachment to Buffalo and its art museum. He had family ties to the city: his great-grandfather, J. Fred Moore, had settled in Kenmore, a Buffalo suburb, in 1896; his grandfather, Frank C. Moore, for whom he was named, graduated from the University of Buffalo Law School; and his father, Earle "Dick" Moore, attended a prestigious Buffalo private school, Nichols Academy. (1) As a child, Moore often visited the Albright-Knox and recalled seeing a Joan Mitchell painting there that "entranced" him (George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, 1957) and a Lucio Fontana exhibition that "terrified" him. Moore was born in 1953, and during his youth the Albright Art Gallery, as it was known until 1962, was a particularly prescient museum. As well as possessing an impressive array of American and European modernist painting, it was one of the few U.S. institutions of the time that was acquiring important first- and second-generation Abstract-Expressionist paintings, sometimes shortly after they were completed.

In an unpublished interview with Scott, Moore said, "When you're trying to do something new or innovative, you don't want to get hung up on your legacy or what I would call my lineage. And I have sort of an erratic lineage; I think every painter puts together an erratic lineage of people they resonate with." (2) To see his paintings in the context of this particular museum is to better sense just how historically grounded an artist he was. Though the collection has been rearranged since Moore's youth, many of the paintings that he would have seen continue to be displayed.

A few steps away from the retrospective I found Miro's Harlequin's Carnival, with its roomful of fantastical creatures and devices. Nearby, a biomorphic tower casts a long shadow over the mordantly surreal landscape in Yves Tanguy's 1942 Indefinite Divisibility. Deeply indebted to Surrealism, Moore's paintings frequently depict dream scenarios and futuristic landscapes not unlike those by Miro or Tanguy. The museum has some splendid examples of Hudson River School paintings, and clearly Moore's unwavering attachment to nature owes much to early American painting (as well as to summers spent in the Adirondacks). I was also struck by a 1912-14 Redon still life showing a vase of red poppies and white lilacs whose blossoms dissolve daintily into the surrounding space. Moore grafts genetics onto Symbolism in paintings like Viral Romance (1992), with its upside-down bouquet of fleurs du mal blooming human immunodeficiency virus, or Missing Links (1997), with its vase of disembodied sense organs, including eyeballs, which Moore often depicted, like his predecessor Redon. Downstairs, a colorful 1938 Self-Portrait with Monkey by Frida Kahlo shows the artist posed against a jungle backdrop with her simian doppelganger peering over her shoulder. Like Kahlo, Moore invested his paintings with autobiographical allusions having to do with his illness, using a bright palette that can feel especially unnerving in light of the works' morbid subject matter. Symbols of death--phantom flowers and a gloomy ghost--hover in the darkness behind a terrified Tahitian girl in Ganguin's great work of 1892, Spirit of the Dead Watching, a subject that surely would have engaged Moore, so conscious of death in his adult life.

Moore was well aware of the contradictions that existed in his chosen artistic lineage. "The Parisian canon," he told Douglas Dreishpoon, a curator at the Albright-Knox, in an interview that appears in the exhibition catalogue, "was saturated with sex, dreams, unconscious desire; my work comes from the woods and lakes, the oceans rather than the bedroom. Nature is my temple and I am endowed with an Emersonian work ethic and a sexual orientation that would horrify Breton." (3)

Because Moore was the preeminent painter of the AIDS pandemic--indeed, in his capacity as an activist in Visual Aids, the artist wing of Act Up, he invented the red ribbon as the movement's now universally recognized logo--he is best known for his treatment of this subject, along with ecology, and the vagaries of the health and pharmaceutical industries. Throughout his work, which also frequently touches on gay eroticism, these themes are inextricably linked. He battled HIV for two decades, surviving his lover of eight years, Robert Fulps, who died in 1991, as well as far too many friends. Over his lifetime he saw the nature to which he was devoted, including Niagara Falls, the subject of several paintings here, begin to fail as unrelentingly as the health of those around him. These facts made him angry and drove him assiduously to educate himself about medicine and ecology. He researched the topics that concerned him down to the level of their molecular constitution and shared what he learned through his paintings. Moore's impassioned political stance was clearly on display in Buffalo, yet to see his retrospective at the Albright-Knox was to better sense how his artistic strengths are never confined by any didactic message, however complex and expansive it may be.