InterlacedViewings
Sheldon Greenberg
When Antoine Watteau painted Pierrot, everybody knew the type. Pierrot was a clown, one of the most popular characters in the French commedia dell’arte. Watteau’s 1718-19 portrait preserved Pierrot’s sensitive persona for centuries after the commedia dell’arte disbanded, providing inspiration to artists ranging from Honoré Daumier to Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Today Watteau’s painting remains an attraction for connoisseurs visiting the Louvre, but neither Pierrot nor Watteau can compete with Dave Chappelle or Banksy in terms of celebrity. The same can be said of masterpieces such as Jan Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring and John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. Neither woman has the face recognition of Cate Blanchett or Susan Sarandon.
Having admired these historic paintings for decades, Sheldon Greenberg wonders whether they might gain new admirers if they were to be reconceived as contemporary art. Greenberg’s speculation was prompted by a book given to him by his wife. The Louvre: All the Paintings included Pierrot and many more personal favorites, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Frans Hals’s Lute Player. “I decided, okay, I’m going to pick the works that I really love, and I’m go-
ing to take the part of those paintings that I find really fascinating,” he recalls. Focusing on the drooping figure of Pierrot, the mischievous face of the Lute Player, and Lisa del Giocondo’s unflappable smile, Greenberg critically broke down what he saw and systematically reconstituted it in his own contemporary style.
Greenberg is a realist painter with a masterful command of his medium, a stylistic virtuoso who has spent the past several decades exploring myriad techniques and approaches to composition. Previous work has seamlessly combined elements of Modernist architecture with the imagery of classic cinema; like Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, he balances Pop Art pastiche with painterly lyricism. In Interlaced Viewings, Greenberg builds on this capacity to recombine conceptual and aesthetic innovations from centuries of art history, radically reinventing dozens of important paintings created over the past five hundred years.
Although some of the originals are currently in the Louvre’s formidable collection, Greenberg has also chosen masterpieces from museums including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (home to Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus), the Mauritshuis in the Hague (custodians of Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (site of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), and the Metropolitan Museum in New York (the location of Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, a painting he first admired while studying at the Art Students League in the 1990s).
As eclectic as these works may be, Greenberg has unified them through his use of visual devices carried over from his past bodies of work. Principal among these are his use of silkscreens, graffiti, and mute charts, as well as stripes and polka dots.
Integrated into his beautifully expressionistic impasto brushwork (and often partially covered by it), the silkscreens are especially important on both a visual and conceptual level. Often taking
Installation view of You Stepped Out of a Dream (after Boticelli) & Let’s Get Lost (after Friedrich)
Installation view of Gun Street Girl (after Boucher), Happy Dreamer (after Leyster) & You Do Something to Me (after Sargent)
Installation view of A Night in Tunisia (after Gérôme) & Stardust (after Vermeer)
Greenberg’s photographs of palm trees as their subject, they provocatively disrupt the traditional spatial organization of paintings from past centuries. “The trees blow out the whole idea of atmospheric perspective,” he says. “It’s not my intention to have a realistic scene.”
The introduction of silkscreens also upsets viewers’ sense of time, at least from an art-historical point of view. Evocative of Rauschenberg’s 1960s Combines, and enlisting a photographic process that didn’t exist in the era of Botticelli or Sargent, they add a postmodern layer to the paintings. Self-referential and often ironic, postmodernism has provided artists in many media with a means to remix the past and present, overlaying multiple versions of reality, combining creative renewal with playful commentary. For instance, when Roy Lichtenstein applied the Ben-Day dots of comic book printing to oil painting, he simultaneously brought a venerable artistic tradition up-to-date and reformatted popular culture as a subject of connoisseurship.
The postmodern turn is given a further twist through Greenberg’s choice of titles, which come from popular songs – Pierrot becomes Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right in tribute to Bob Dylan – as well as his silkscreened cartoon characters and playfully cartoonish graffiti. “Some of those cartoon images are more easily readable than the main composition,” Greenberg remarks with teasing irony.
For instance, his version of Frans Hals’ Lute Player (titled Smooth Operator in tribute to Sade) has the musician performing for Minnie Mouse, his Mona Lisa (titled Sittin’ Pretty in tribute to Bobbie Gentry) has Minnie Mouse’s smirk facing off against Lisa del Giocondo’s smile, and Watteau’s Pierrot shares the stage with a silkscreened Betty Boop. (As a matter of bringing Pierrot up-to-date, Greenberg takes a greater leap than did Daumier or Gérôme.)
But it’s the mute chart, which Greenberg renders in mesmerizing patterns of stripes or polka dots, and sometimes integrates into compositions as patterns on subjects’ garments, that most consistently appears in the body of work, and that provides an essential leitmotif. For example, a mute chart stripes a scarf wrapped around the neck of Friedrich’s wanderer, and speckles the dress of Sargent’s Madame X.
The mute chart also carries Greenberg’s work back to its conceptual origin. “The mute chart came from teaching,” he explains. “This is how students learn to create a mute by mixing complementary colors.” Through the mute chart, Greenberg suggests that his works might teach us how to see again: to recognize the genius of his artistic antecedents, and perhaps to appreciate the present through their eyes.
Installation view of Stardust (after Vermeer) & Walk on the Wild Side (after Gauguin)
You Stepped Out of a Dream (after Botticelli), 2023 acrylic and screenprint on panel, 56 x 48 inches
3 Gymnopedies (after Caravaggio), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 56 x 48 inches
Get On the Good Foot (after Bonheur), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 56 x 48 inches
Alone Together (after Morandi), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 36 x 36 inches
Spill the Wine (after Caravaggio), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 56 x 48 inches
Let’s Get Lost (after Friedrich), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 56 x 48 inches
I Put a Spell On You (after Lempicka), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 56 x 48 inches
You Do Something to Me (after Sargent), 2023 acrylic and screen print on canvas over panel, 48 x 41 inches
Walk on the Wild Side (after Gauguin), 2023 acrylic and screen print on canvas over panel, 41 x 48 inches
Beyond the Sea (after Lempicka), 2023 acrylic and screen print on canvas over panel, 64 x 48 inches
A Night in Tunisia (after Gérôme), 2023 acrylic and screen print on canvas over panel, 48 x 41 inches
All the Way Up (after Meléndez), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 26 x 22 inches
Eyes Without a Face (after Magritte), 2023 acrylic and screen print on panel, 28 x 24 7/8 inches
After Chardin No. 4, 2023
acrylic and screenprint on paper; No. 4 of Suite: 7
17 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches image size, 22 1/4 x 30 inches paper size
After Chardin No.7, 2023
acrylic and screenprint on paper; No. 7 of Suite: 7
22 x 28 1/4z inches image size, 22 1/4 x 30 inches paper size
Born Shreveport, Louisiana, 1956
EDUCATION
1993-94 California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, MFA
1985-86 Art Students League, New York
1975-80 San Jose State University, San Jose, BS
ONE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2023 Modernism Inc., San Francisco
2022 Slate Gallery, 101 Second Street, San Francisco
2019 Modernism West, San Francisco
2018 Startup Art Fair, Venice, CA
2014 Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego
2011 Modernism, San Francisco
2010 Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego, CA
2008 Modernism, San Francisco
2007 Spur Projects, Portola Valley, CA
Susan Street Fine Arts, San Diego, CA
2006 Modernism, San Francisco
Susan Street Fine Arts, San Diego, CA
2005 Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego
2004 Modernism, San Francisco
2003 Modernism, San Francisco
2002 Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento
2001 Modernism, San Francisco
Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego
Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento
2000 Modernism, San Francisco
1998 Modernism, San Francisco
Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento
1997 Mike, San Francisco
Space 743, San Francisco
1996 Sierra College, Library Gallery, Rocklin, CA
Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento
1995 Barbara Anderson Gallery, Berkeley
Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento
1994 Barbara Anderson Gallery, Berkeley
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SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 SpringExhibition, San Diego Museum, CA
2022 SpringExhibition, San Diego Museum, CA
deYoungOpen, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA
2017 Crocker Kingsley, Sacramento, CA
2016 NonObjective, Blue Lane Arts, Sacramento, CA
2007 Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento, CA
2004 25thAnniversaryExhibition, Modernism, San Francisco
2003 Mark Jason Fine Art, London
2002 Modernism, San Francisco
Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego
2000 72ndCrocker-KingsleyExhibit, Sacramento
WitandWhimsy, Susan Street Fine Art, San Diego
1997 Get in Here, Part Two, Traywick Gallery, Berkeley
BigKidsToybox, Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento
1996 17thAnnualBayArts ‘96, San Mateo
Glean, Four Walls Gallery, San Francisco
ArmoryArtCenterFigurativeWorks, West Palm Beach
Stockton National, Stockton
1995 SixtyFifthAnnualStatewide, Santa Cruz
Twelfth Annual, Visual Arts Alliance, Houston
Triton Museum, Santa Clara
1994 Berkeley Art Center Association, Berkeley
1993 14thAnnualBayArts “93”, San Mateo
1992 13thAnnualBayArts “92”, San Mateo
Berkeley Art Center Association, Berkeley
Hats and Head Gear, San Francisco Arts Commission TestingtheMarket, Untitled Gallery, San Francisco
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Cooley Godward, LLP, San Diego
Interland, San Mateo, CA
Southwestern Bell Wireless, Dallas
Union 76, Los Angeles
Wachovia Securities, La Jolla, CA
Installation view of 3 Gymnopedies (after Caravaggio) & Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right (after Watteau)
