Susan Hauptman at Tatistcheff/Rogers - Santa Monica, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 1996 by Janet Koplos

Susan Hauptman's exhibition of self-portraits and still lifes in charcoal and pastel traveled to Tatistcheff Gallery in New York, where she lives, after its showing in Santa Monica. The two still lifes in the show, both about 40 inches square, are quirky blends of realism and stylization in which a few lonely objects--a candy dish, a fruit bowl, a bottle or a figurine--make a sparse arrangement that can scarcely be described as "composed." The objects seem to be waiting for a unifying will. The 1995 Still Life has perspective distortions (a pedestal dish is seen partly from the side and partly from above), and a few naturalistically colored items are surprises in the finely toned black and white works. The 1994 Still Life presents a bottle filled with flowers that are nearly trompe l'oeil, while a backdrop of graphically simplified daisies offers an entirely different style of representation.

But it's the five Self Portraits, from 1994 and '95, that make this show noteworthy. In each, Hauptman depicts the same stony-faced, androgynous head--middle-aged but firm, strong-jawed, without makeup, broad mouth slightly downturned, fair hair in a boy's cut--appended to various bodies, dressed or undressed but all conveying a sense of fantasy and given only a touch (or two) of color. The figure is centered and usually set high on the paper, head touching the top edge in some cases. Backgrounds are nonspecific: variegated like photo-studio portrait backdrops, vertically split into light and dark halves, or scattered with daisylike flower heads that drift down like autumn leaves to fill a dense floral border. In this last case, the artist stands in a sleeveless wrap-around house dress of a similar bold flower design. Her right arm is folded behind her and her left, bent at the elbow and held close to her body, lifts a yellow pencil, the only color in the work. Hauptman's stern face and brush cut seem transported from another world into this flowery artifice.

In one work she wears a dark garment, and her left hand, in a long white glove tinged with yellow, holds a voluminous tulle wrap in place. In another she wears a '50s-style gathered-waist dress of a fabric that looks like an astronomical photo, and some of the stars have splattered into the darkness above her right shoulder. In one drawing she is nude, her smooth young body untouched by injury, gravity or wear. The turban tied around her head yields two full, pointed paintbrushlike ends that echo the sharpness of her elbows as she stands bluntly frontal with her hands held at the small of her back. The impossibility of that face having that body establishes beyond question the role of imagination in these works. Hauptman's sober, factual face in every case looks out at us, daring us to question its wish-fulfillment in these exemplary renderings.