Helen Oliver Adelson: The Road by Modern IDENTITY Inc.

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Helen Oliver Adelson: The Road Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! Happening curates exhibitions and stages live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”

Published on the occasion of the exhibition February 29â&#x20AC;&#x201C;April 12, 2020 At Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project HOWL A/P/E Volume 1, No. 37

Helen Oliver Adelson: The Road

NIGHT ROAD FROM MIMMO'S, 2018 Oil on canvas 155⁄8 x 23½ inches NEXT SPREAD

ROAD SIGNS, 2018 2

Oil on canvas 31½ x 19¾ inches

Enigmas of Enchantment: The Paintings of Helen Oliver By Tom Breidenbach

There is a theatrical quality to Helen Oliver’s paintings, their scale and earthy palette recalling, in one glance, those eerily charmed circus or movie marquee posters of yesteryear. This feels especially true of her portraits, which loom large enough to engulf the viewer in the formal contortions of their sometimes nude subjects. Yet these works also feel intimate, the bodies they expressionistically depict—or aspects of them, an arm, a hand—being rendered with a painterly finesse that can contrast to the more gestural, mask-like evocations of her sitters’ faces. While some were painted on commission, most of the portraits are of the artist’s friends, and for each her subject sat for her, lending to the palpably personal sense of presence these works evoke. Due no doubt to the staggered lines and optical distortions characterizing her renderings of certain subjects, Oliver’s work is sometimes compared, as she notes, to that of Egon Schiele. Yet while she admires his work, any influence it might have on her own isn’t conscious, she points out, adding that she feels most inspired by Giotto—“my idol,” Oliver calls him—and Renaissance masters including Masaccio, Bartolomeo Montagna, and Botticelli. The cryptic poise often characterizing these painters’ subjects registers in Oliver’s own portraits, whose subjects seem to hover in stately equidistance between tragic and comic antipodes. The lines and shapes in Oliver’s landscapes, meanwhile, can feel quaintly bumbling, affably eccentric, naively captivating somehow. Especially affecting is Road Signs (2017), in which a sweetly lumbering mountainscape is rendered in a wash of blue close in hue to the aquamarine of the painting’s sky. The gestural

frankness with which its minimal features are depicted—firmament, mountains, grass, and sign—and the subtle variations of the work’s essentially dichromatic palette, contribute to the plaintive earnest of its effect. Pisa River (2017) is similarly stirring, evoking its features—a river lined with lights and swerving bumptiously toward us—with gestural élan, each brushstroke feeling essential to the work’s seemingly childlike allure. Oliver describes her childhood in Savannah, Georgia, as “very isolated.” Her father died when she was a little over a year old, and she grew up with her mother and brother, the East Village actor and playwright Edgar Oliver, for whose plays at La MaMa Helen would eventually paint backdrops. Throughout her childhood she watched her mother paint, though was never allowed to touch her paints. During the family’s travels north, “We practically lived at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which my mother was obsessed with wandering through,” Oliver says. The isolation of childhood appears to inform the gaze Oliver casts on the world. The gaze of a perennial outsider, it would seem, who found a home in something forbidden in her youth. A home that came to include other outsiders: “In New York I painted my friends, East Village performers, artists, drag queens, and all that...” She has lived in Italy since 2000, and there has increasingly painted landscapes due to “the dearth of people to paint.” Yet if these exhibit a de Chirico-esque desolation, they are also informed, like her portraits, with an endearing knowing, of the sort born of solitude, and of the ingenuousness required to embrace it.

EDGAR, 1978 Oil on canvas 60 x 33 inches

MARC LUSTENBERGER, 1983 Oil on canvas 61 x 52 inches

EDGAR, 1985

Oil on canvas 75 x 55Â½ inches

DAVID AND PHILLIP (THE CAT), 1990 Oil on canvas 74Â½ x 57 inches

EDGAR (HARLEQUIN), 2017 Oil on canvas 80 x 60 inches

Humanist Alchemy: The Paintings of Helen Oliver Adelson By David Ebony

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind. 1 — Patti Smith, Devotion

Helen Oliver Adelson’s portrait paintings of her friends, family, and acquaintances seem to result from a kind of alchemical process. The sitter poses, always a single figure; the artist draws directly on the canvas, then paints the myriad elements: limbs, torso, facial features, eyes, hair, etc. In the process, she transforms the subject into something unique, an artwork as individual as the person she portrays, but with something extra, an additional spark. By means of line and color, Adelson intuitively unleashes and then contains a concentrated area of energy that she discovers within the character of each person, and which eventually resides in the completed portrait. The alchemy in Adelson’s work is thus hidden, embedded in the coiling ridges of the image as well as the viewer’s mind, a phenomenon that corresponds to the alchemy that writer and musician Patti Smith has observed in the creation of a poem or a work of fiction. In Edgar Harlequin (2017), an approximately life-size image of her brother, Adelson shows the well-known writer and performance artist Edgar Oliver donning the checkered costume of a circus performer. It is an uncanny work, emblematic perhaps of the siblings’ close relationship. Raised by their artistic mother, they realized early on that they were very different from other children in Savannah, Georgia, where they grew up. Their mother taught them to celebrate that difference and encouraged them to become artists. The alchemical energy in Edgar Harlequin,

with the figure shown from the waist up, radiates from the expressive hands and the mask-like rendering of the face. The elongated, twisted, and gnarled hands in particular convey an intense emotional power, as well as a certain psychological omnipotence that could reflect some aspect of her brother’s personality. The intense focus on the hands in this work, combined with the rather formal pose of the subject, recalls El Greco’s famous portrait, The Nobleman with His Hand on His Chest (ca. 1580), with its mysterious gesture. The anxious workworn hands in Cézanne portraits, like Woman with a Cafetière (1895) or Seated Peasant (c. 1900-04), both in the Musée d’Orsay, also come to mind. The fantastically wrought, expressively exaggerated hands in other Adelson paintings, such as Gaby (2015), and David and Phillip (The Cat) (ca. 1990), are also key to the paintings’ psychological dimension. In David and Phillip (The Cat), it is difficult to turn away from the rhythmical, undulating hands in order to examine the demonic-looking cat that David caresses. These works beg comparison to certain Egon Schiele paintings and drawings. Adelson, however, has remarked that while she admires the Austrian painter’s works, they have not had a direct influence on her own. The subject’s hand in her Mimmo (2018) grasps a beverage-filled drinking glass. The elongated tubular digits here suggest rather phallic shapes and lend the painting a subtle erotic overtone. The expressivity of Adelson’s paintings might appear to be part of a long tradition of psychological portraiture—from that of Otto Dix to Alice Neel. There is a humanistic quality to Adelson’s endeavor that she shares with those artists.

A consistent ambiguity in Adelson’s work, however, sets it apart. The images vacillate between the hallucinatory, bordering on surrealism, and a raw pragmatic quality that makes them appear utterly truthful, despite the strange distortions. This singularity might best be observed in Adelson’s nude portraits. The female nude in a large 2015 composition, The Siren (Alex Wolkowicz), assumes a monumental presence, as the figure looms against a sumptuous turquoise background activated by bravura brushstrokes. The seated figure’s pale gray-white pallor might hint at a rather unhealthy physical state. The figure’s upright posture, however, and the firm musculature, with finely modulated shading of the coiling limbs, impart a lively tension. And the white face marked with thick turquoise lines, like a kabuki mask outlined with shocks of blond hair, also contribute to the work’s rather stylish and affirmative theatricality. Similarly, a robust portrait of the artist Penny Arcade (1994) shows a reclining figure with a wildly exaggerated hand partially covering her left breast. The eye follows the serpentine lines of the right arm and torso upward, toward the face, which is marked with bright red lines. The tribal mask-like faces that are among the prominent attributes of Adelson’s portraiture reflect the artist’s aim to convey the sitter’s inner life, just as the eccentric features of the body she renders suggest an internal physiognomy rather than expected external appearances. In her practice, Adelson draws the figure directly on canvas while the sitter poses. She paints most of the canvas later, except for the face, which she always completes with the model present. Adelson is largely self-taught as a painter, with a background in art history, specializing in Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture. She exudes in her artwork a profound sense of freedom to break the rules of conventional figurative painting. In one composition she can com18

bine the graceful countenance of one of Graham Sutherland’s portraits, with the touches of lyrical grotesquery characteristic of a Francis Bacon portrait. Adelson’s work sparks a conversation about the metabolic implications of the body and body posture, as painter and sociobiology expert Desmond Morris explores in his 2019 book Postures: Body Language in Art. Examining portrait subjects as “power posers,” and noting a Harvard University study of the hormonal impact of posing for a portrait, he writes, “High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feeling of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern.”2 Adelson likens the process of painting the figure to landscape painting, with strong emotional responses to line and color taking hold of her as the image evolves on the canvas. It is hardly surprising then, that she would find inspiration in the environs of Tarquinia, in Tuscany, Italy, where she lives and works for a large part of the year. The place is haunted by its ancient Etruscan culture, which lives on in its architectural remnants and in the phantasmagoric ancient mural paintings in the Etruscan tombs. The underground galleries are enlivened with ancient paintings that can be visited, and according to the artist, the murals’ rich, muted, earthy colors have informed her painting. Bomarzo Passageway (2017), for example, features a spare image of a monumental stone vault, and a road leading to a distant doorway, perhaps the entrance to a tomb. The work conveys the melancholy, elegiac air of the ancient city. Night Road from Mimmo’s (2018) and Lido Night Scene (2019) capture the hushed atmosphere and sense of enchanted reverie of ancient evenings. In her work, Adelson examines the possibilities of portraiture as highly charged psychosexual landscapes, and she lends to her landscapes and city scenes a personal, metaphysical dimension.

1 Patti Smith, Devotion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 27. Desmond Morris, Postures: Body Language in Art (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 70.

MARK KOVAL, 1990 Oil on canvas 74 x 59 inches

ERIC ROMOELE, 1990 Oil on canvas 50 x 40 inches

HAPI PHACE, 1992 Oil on canvas 73 x 58 inches

PENNY ARCADE, 1994 Oil on canvas 78 x 58 inches

MARY LOU WITTMER, 1990

Oil on canvas 74 x 59 inches

EDGAR, 1995 Oil on canvas 76 x 56 inches

LESTER, 2012 Oil on canvas 50 x 38 inches

ANTOINE VERMOUTIER, 2013

Oil on canvas 585⁄8 x 43 inches

EDGAR WITH GREEN GLASS II, 2014 Oil on canvas 58Â¾ x 43 inches

NEXT SPREAD

THE SIREN (ALEX WOLKOWICZ), 2015 Oil on canvas 90 x 73 inches

GABY, 2015 36

Oil on canvas 50 x 44 inches

WOOD NYMPH II, 2019 Oil on canvas 62½ x 82 inches

NEXT SPREAD

BOMARZO PASSAGEWAY, 2017 Oil on canvas 25 5⁄8 x 15¾ inches

FARNESIANA ARCHES, 2017 40

Oil on canvas 235⁄8 x 15¾ inches

OLGA, 2018

Oil on canvas 39¼ x 27½ inches

NEXT SPREAD

GIOVANNI, 2018 Oil on canvas 39¼ x 27½ inches

MONTALTO TOWER, 2019 44

Oil on canvas 39¼ x 195⁄8 inches

PISA RIVER, 2017 Oil on canvas 15¾ x 235⁄8 inches

LAURA VALESI, 2018 Oil on canvas 47¼ x 35½ inches

NEXT SPREAD

VAL DE MIGNONE ROAD WITH HOUSE, 2017 Oil on canvas 15¾ x 235⁄8 inches

ROMAN FORTRESS DOOR, 2018 50

Oil on canvas 31¾ x 19¾ inches

LUDOVIC AND CATHY, 2018

Oil on canvas 47¼ x 35½ inches

GELATERIA ARCHES, 2018

Oil on canvas 19¾ x 27½ inches

ROAD FROM MIMMO'S, 2018

Oil on canvas 31½ x 19¾ inches

MIMMO, 2018

Oil on canvas 39¼ x 31½ inches

ELIZABETH PUGH, 2016 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches

GIULIANO BALDACCI, 2018

Oil on canvas 39¼ x 27½ inches

ROAD TO MAILBOX, 2018 Oil on canvas 235⁄8 x 15¾ inches

NEXT SPREAD

SICILY PIAZZA, 2018 Oil on canvas 235⁄8 x 15¾ inches

TARQUINIA FROM AFAR, 2018 64

Oil on canvas 27½ x 19¾ inches

PISA STREET, 2017

Oil on canvas 27½ x 15¾ inches

Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker

Helen Oliver Adelson The Road Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project February 29–April 12, 2020

Board of Advisors LIDO NIGHT SCENE, 2019

Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 37 ISBN: 978-1-7338785-8-6

Carlo McCormick Marc H Miller Maynard Monrow

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Dan on Cameron Oil canvas Curt 5 Hoppe 19 ⁄8 x 27½ inches

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© 2020 Tom Breidenbach © 2020 David Ebony Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper

In Memoriam of our Beloved Board Member, Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Founder and Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Assistant Director: Josh Nierodzinski Director of Development: Nicole Bliss Director of Education: Katherine Cheairs Digital Content Manager: Jake Couri Program Coordinator: Daniel Wallace Registrar/Archive: Daniel A. Silva Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Preparator: David Gimbert Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Gallery design: Space ODT/Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business/Susan Martin Gallery Photographer: Jason Wyche

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LIDO NIGHT SCENE, 2019

Oil on canvas 195⁄8 x 27½ BACK COVER

LIDO NIGHT SCENE, 2019

Oil on canvas 85½ x 27½ inches

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