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Loren MacIver at Alexandre - New York - paintings and drawings - Brief Article
Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Jonathan Gilmore
In the late 1930s and early '40s, Loren MacIver developed a sweet, playful style that superimposed linear, symbolic and hieroglyphic forms on soft, pale washes of color. This show surveyed paintings and drawings from those years, during which MacIver, who was largely self-taught, had her first New York exhibitions, including one at the gallery of Pierre Matisse. (The show coincided with the Morgan Library's exhibition on Matisse, who represented MacIver for over 50 years).
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The earliest works, most painted on Cape Cod, combine figurative and abstract elements with a dreamlike indistinctness, as in Penny Candy (1939), where brightly colored sweets appear to drift through murky water among swimming fish. With graphic whimsy and inventiveness that recall Paul Klee, MacIver drew schematic, linear forms (such as the umbrella-headed stick figure among higgledy-piggledy shacks in Here's the Way it Goes (1937) over color washes suggesting ocean and dunes. Her images of New York employ the same technique but with a darker, moodier tone. Punctuated by anecdotal Ash Can School-type grocery store signs and gaping apartment windows (revealing shower curtains, lamps and wine bottles within), Strunsky House (1935) is painted with sooty browns and sulfurous yellow washes that create a forbidding and tenebrous effect. We see that combination of fancy and menace in Tenants, Washington Square (1935), a gloomy, phantasmagoric night scene of houses (rendered with only abbreviated patches of bright color) clustered around a pitch-black area empty but for a potted plant.
In later works painted during winters in Key West, MacIver addressed more modest subjects on a smaller scale. With a folk-art sensibility, she created decorative friezes out of abstracted organic forms while employing polka dots--which were used by residents of the area to adorn pots and taborets--as an abstract motif extending through out the entire pictorial field. Eventually she achieved an almost purely formal vocabulary using elements drawn from everyday life. Garden Labyrinth (1939), for example, adopts a bird's-eye view of a maze, transforming the canvas into an allover geometric design embellished with the patterns of brick walls, beach pebbles and slatted garden fences. Likewise, abstract designs derived from dry reeds, postage cancellations, typography, wire fences, waves and seagulls fill the spiral form of Snail Maze (1949). Products of a poetic, transformative imagination, these works exhibit a childlike fascination with the delicate visual structure inherent in the most familiar things.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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