“Artemisia Bliemisch” say white letters on an orange banner stretched over the entrance to the new Gentileschi Gallery on 7th Street in Washington DC. They moved from P Street in the spring. Artie is now hanging the exhibition, which opens next week. The double fronted gallery windows are framed in brushed aluminum surrounded by polished black granite. Steve and I can’t see in as the windows and door are curtained with a coarse white fabric that has small gun-metal blue spirals in the weave that look like madly distorted little springs. A small fluffy longhaired calico cat is playing between curtain and window to the left of the door. She bats with a swift white paw at something crawling up the glass and it looks as if she has pulled some metal out of the curtain too.
There’s a small gap between the end of the curtain and the doorframe. We look through the glass at the cat’s gap in the curtain and knock. Artie walks distractedly towards the door in her striped railway-man’s cap. Her black tea-shirt hangs from her broad shoulders stained with drips of white and various yellow tones, which all but obscure the P.U. logo. Her white cargo pants have paint encrusting the knees. The pockets are loaded with rags, tools, and a small paint roller hangs from a loop at her hip.
Installation of her latest and most ambitious work has not left her much time for sleep. She unlocks the door and lets us in with a big hug for Steve Strether who helped her move the big pieces in the Cavendish Pie Shop’s van last week. Her cell-phone ring chimes sound with a metallic crash of something falling, many things perhaps. She looks down at the screen as if it had bitten her and then ignores the call with the flick of her finger.
Fatigue surrounds her eyes in deepening red hollows under her brows and her voice is hoarse. She takes off her hat and her black hair is cut short rising off her head in damp black tufts and spikes as she rubs. A grin lightens her face as she notices Steve’s concentrated look at the work before us.
“Oh Cangiante! you are going in the crate now.” She picks up the cat, which has lost interest in the curtain and window and seems headed for a jar full of small paintbrushes on the floor.
“She’s going to the vet at 3.” Cangiante chirps as Artie picks her up.
She says a lot more in Italian as she carries the cat to the back of the gallery where there is a kitchen, office and storeroom. We can hear yells of protest as she is dropped in the crate. Artie returns and stands next to Steve.
“Is that a new cat?”
“Steve, she adopted me this week, here at the gallery. I think she’s a Persian.”
“That flat face of hers is striking – How do you think she will get along with your black and gray kitty, Sfumato, back at your studio?
“There’s Bounder!”
Echoing barks come from the back and fill the room.
“There was no one to take Bounder today so she has been hanging out here.”
“Artie, we could have taken care of Bounder.”
“Well, I thought Diddlie could take her Steve, but she has something on today. That might be her.”
Diddlie brings Bounder in from the back, on a short leash. Artie greats Bounder in Italian and Bounder enjoys a lot of attention but also strains to sniff the exhibits. Two paintings about ten by four feet hang on the wall in front us. They are close together lengthways, all in browns that tend towards blue, yellow and gray in a vaguely cubist composition. It is called “Random Comments”. At first glance it’s as if forms in the painting have fallen off the canvas and spread across the floor in front of it. It is as if the front fell off a building into the street as rubble, with the interior of the building standing open behind the wreckage. Warm tones of oak, and cherry and deep black mahogany greet the eye in the rubble pile stacked against the bottom of the painting.
Bounder noses several thin off-cuts and tries to grab one of the longer pieces from the assemblage.
“Diddlie, I don’t need Bounder to rearrange this thing!”
“I know, I’ll hold her back.” Diddlie pulls Bounder away, waving a treat under the dog’s nose. Artie is looking carefully where Bounder’s snout has been pulled away. She mumbles a long quiet Italian monologue into Bounder’s ear and she picks something up.
“The dog’s drooled on this piece of cherry.”
“I love those impressionist brush strokes you are using Artie.”
“Are they impressionist Did.?” Artie is still holding the piece of wood with thumb and finger, trying to avoid getting wet with dog drool.
“Yeah, you know, free and fast, like Monet, Van Gogh or Degas.”
“Diddlie you are a little mixed up honey.”
“Am I?” Artie pulls a rag from her pocket to wipe drool.”
“Monet saw differently from Degas who saw differently from Van Gogh.”
“But Artie, they are all called impressionists.”
“I know, Monet and Degas did exhibit together but they were using paint in different ways.”
“That’s it Did, Degas actually completed very little compared with say, Ingres.”
“Steve, much is suggested by Degas, sometimes with pretty wild paint.”
“That’s what I mean Artie, ‘wild paint’. Like you have here!”
“Diddlie, I don’t think Degas was an impressionist at all.”
“Right, think of Monet by comparison.”
“You can’t really see Monet’s drawing Steve. It is all in the positioning of the paint strokes.”
“That’s it Artie, he didn’t do lines. He did what he called, ‘patches of color’”. Artie has finished wiping her piece of cherry. She holds it at her side and throws the rag in an old ‘Maker’s Mark’ carton near the door.
“The thing is Diddlie, just look at the paint.”
“You might say everything else comes after that.”
“Well you might say so Steve. I look at the picture.”
Steve has not looked away from the painting since he came in. He points at the assemblage in front of us.
“Okay Artie, so now the work is uncovered I guess these are two of the big paintings we moved in the van, and we must have carried this stuff on the floor packed in the old liquor cartons.”
“Steve, I spent the last three days arranging the stuff on the floor. These and the stuff in the other room.” Artie replaces the piece of cherry she was cleaning.
“Quite a nice diptych.”
“I hadn’t thought of it in those terms Steve.”
“Artie, where did you find all this highly finished wood?”
“Old furniture.”
“Okay, and a lot of paint … some of this is the original finish and some of it is faux. You painted it yourself, right?”
“That’s right and spent a long time standing at the band saw, Steve.”
“Do I see some analytic cubism here in the painting?”
“You might.”
“Maybe de Kooning as well, with Artie’s brown chiaroscuro palette”.
“If you can find de Kooning Steve, I’ll gratefully accept the compliment.”
The surfaces exposed by cutting the old wooden furniture appear at first to have the same finish as the rest of the off-cut, but a more careful look reveals layers of paint contributing their own texture. Thin pieces of resin shaped like gestural brush strokes in yellow and white stand out where they are distributed in the wood pile; some tiny, others bigger, are positioned in the middle of the tumble. All look as if they fell off the painting. The wood on the ground looks like a random pile at first, though carefully arranged from large to small, with the largest at the back against the painting, the smallest at the outer edges. The painted gestures on the canvas, are suggested in the wood pile and the colors in the wood show in the painting.
Steve is on his hands and knees looking as closely as he can at the wood and now he gets up and steps back.
“Your impasto on some of these pieces of wood leave the same impression as forms in the painting. I mean the wood looks like paint down there on the floor, and the paint on canvas looks like wood.”
“Right Steve, but notice there are no pieces of wood fastened to the canvas.”
Steve steps further back squinting at the work.
“The painting is abstract and ah … figurative in a way too.”
“Hope you can see it both ways Steve.” Steve has backed up almost into the next room, and when he notices where he is, he looks over at the exhibits there. Diddlie has already moved on and is sitting on the windowsill with Bounder lying on the floor in front of her. “Hi Steve, come join us!” Bounder lifts his head from his paws stretched out in front of him.
“Did. you better get a tight hold now.”
“Its never easy Artie as I don’t speak Italian.”
Artie tells Bounder something and turns back to the work. Her second installation, called “Neoplastic Event” is in the room to the right of the entrance. A single painting perhaps eight feet square hangs with a pile of colorful objects on the floor in front of it. This square painting is strongly reminiscent of Mondrian’s compositions with black lines dividing up the surface in primary colors and whites and grays.
Artie and I follow Steve into the next room where Bounder rushes forward pulling Diddlie up on to her feet. Bounder picks up another object in his enthusiasm, only to drop it under Artie’s glare. Diddlie regains control, pulling Bounder back to the windowsill without her black painted prize.
“I call these ‘sticks’ Steve, and the colored pieces are boards.” The ‘sticks’ are less than one by one in section, and a foot to several feet long and correspond to black lines on the painting. What Artie calls the ‘boards’ correspond to the planes of color enclosed by the black lines in the painting.
Squares and rectangles, or ‘boards’ of various dimensions are painted in the same colors as the painting and both are spread out and piled up on the floor in front of the canvas. The effect suggests that all these three dimensional objects spilled from the flat surface of the painting as in the cubist assemblage in the other room.
“Is this based on a particular work of Mondrian?”
“No, Fred it’s a Bliemisch. I am still arranging the 3D stuff.”
Artie picks up a square box of about eighteen inches by four.
“Oh luckily the paint is dry!” When Bounder picked up her black ‘stick’ she drooled on the box beneath. She wipes more of Bounder’s curiosity off the box with another rag from her bulging pocket.
“Did. let’s take this dog outside.” Diddlie and Artie go out the front door with Bounder who seems inattentive to another monologue in Italian. While Steve and I stay on looking at the work.
“Fred, Artie, is reversing tradition.”
“What do you mean, reversing?”
“There is a long tradition of artists rendering three dimensions into two dimensional pictures.”
“She is working from two-dimensional abstract paintings into three-dimensional objects.”
“Also Fred, reversing the careful organization of a painting into the apparent chaos of fallen rubble …”
… and it’s a lot of work to arrange the look of chaos here on the floor.”
“Is it an illusion then Fred?”
“Like the painting, the wood is and it isn’t.”
“How like the painting Fred?”
“I mean does the painting render form or not?”
“You mean three-dimensional form right? The brown one in the other room does, sort of, but this flat painting isn’t rendering any illusion. It does have form though.”
“Steve, I’d say the paint is a statement of fact.”
“Okay and what would you say about the wood?”
“The painted wood is what the painting wanted to be Steve, in the next life.”
“Oh! so we are looking at this new life in the here and now!”
“Do you see the flat painting like a plan for the wood.”
“Well, chaos has no plan Fred.”
“Steve you might say this is planned chaos, an illusion of chaos, here on the floor. These bits of wood are supposed to look as if they fell here randomly but in fact Artie spent hours on the arrangement.”
“The colors follow the painting exactly, but look carefully at the arrangement. It is orderly from large to small progressing out from the bottom of the painting.”
“Yes and the wood is all arranged in ninety degree angles. It couldn’t just fall into that position.”
“No the pieces would be all higgledy-piggledy.”
“Yes, we might say painted wood and painted canvas reflect each other.”
