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18 - THE GALLERY April 27, 2012 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly
Revisiting Boston Expressionism
Anne Lyman Powers (American, b 1922), “The Big Wind,” 1961, oil on canvas, 40 by 48
inches; signed and dated lower left.
Childs Gallery Offers Insights On This
Regional Midcentury Art Movement
Karl Zerbe (American 1903–1972), “Angel and Rooster,” 1948, encaustic on board, 24 by 32
inches; signed lower right.
BOSTON, MASS. — On March 17, Boston’s AD 20/21 Art & Design show
presented a panel discussion titled “Boston Expressionism: Modernist Art at Midcentury
and Today.” The speakers were Katherine French, executive director of
the Danforth Museum; Judith Bookbinder, professor of Art History at Boston
College and author of Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism;
and Richard Baiano, president of Childs Gallery, which specializes in mid-
Twentieth Century figurative modernism, including Boston Expressionists and
their descendants.
An overflow crowd attended the event, attesting to the renewed interest in this
regional art movement, a trend Baiano sees reflected in requests from his own
clientele. Why now? Baiano suggests three major reasons:
“First, there is the national trend of museums exhibiting and educating the public
about midcentury American modernism — both figurative and abstract —
leading to a heightened enthusiasm for collecting those works, as evidenced by
widespread representation at New York’s prestigious Armory Show earlier this
month. Closer to home, Danforth’s illustrative focus on Boston Expressionism has
certainly popularized that movement and its artists locally.
“Second, there is a higher appreciation for figurative art these days and the
acknowledgement that abstraction and minimalism weren’t the only movements
important at mid-Twentieth Century.
“And third,” says Baiano, “we are a changed society since 9/11 and its horrific
aftermath. Issues of violence, political unrest, prejudice, spirituality and the struggle
to maintain humanity in a threatening modern world — the very lifeblood of
the Boston Expressionists — resonate as strongly today as in the period surrounding
World War II.”
Meridith Cutler, artscope contributor, explains, “The Boston School grew out of
a deep respect for the work of Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann and other
Expressionist painters caught up in Europe’s perilous political landscape,” in her
review of director Katherine French’s recent exhibit The Expressive Voice at the
Danforth Museum. “Karl Zerbe, a German refugee painter who brought European
Expressionism to Boston, hit a nerve with his protégées at the Museum
School, many of them immigrants of the Jewish Baltic diaspora struggling to contextualize
their secular identities in a modern America.”
And at the same time Zerbe was painting and teaching students such as David
Aronson, Jason Berger and Arthur Polonsky (from 1937 to 1955), Harvard art
school classmates and friends Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom were also developing
highly individualistic figurative painting styles: Levine focusing on politically
charged polemics; Bloom exploring spiritually and death. These artists communicated
the evils and angst of their times through richly saturated colors, frenzied
brushstrokes and inventive figurative compositions that would soon become outof-step
with the tidal wave of abstraction.
But every Boston painter who favored figuratism over abstraction during the
1940s was not necessarily a Boston Expressionist, and that is where the various
experts diverge. Most agree that attending Boston’s Museum School under Zerbe
and focusing on societal issues in their works are important criteria.
Childs Gallery represents the Boston artist Anne Lyman Powers, who was a firsthand
witness to the “Degenerate” art show in Nazi Germany and later studied
with Zerbe at the Museum School. Her masterful paintings convey biting social
and political commentary in vividly colorful scenes that dominate every inch of
the canvas. A former sculptor, Powers gave her figures more dimensionality than
many of her Boston Expressionist peers, but she also shared Zerbe’s amorphous
blending of expressionism, surrealism and magic realism.
Baiano finds Ture Bengtz, another formative teacher at the Museum School,
particularly intriguing as his painterly figurative style so clearly mirror his contemporaries,
while his lack of “angst” set him apart. An immigrant from Finland and
happily married, Bengtz chose to focus on amusing everyday life experiences
rather than the social injustices of the world.
New to the gallery is Boston artist Giovanni DeCunto, who studied under
David Aronson. DeCunto describes his philosophy as having “been shaped by
two essential themes — an early fascination with religious icons, and a concern
for contemporary social issues which simultaneously threaten and define our culture.”
Given the striking way he moves paint around the canvas (applying colors
directly from the tube) his emboldened color palette, and the monumentality of
his figurative works, is he not a true descendant of the Boston Expressionists?
Viewers can decide for themselves.
Childs Gallery is located at 169 Newbury Street in Boston. To contact the gallery, call
617-266-1108 or email info@childsgallery.com.