ArtSeen
Elizabeth Josephson
Sideshow Gallery
The study of how an individual feature reflects a person’s soul, spirit, or personality is an old concern of artists. However, it is only at the end of the 19th Century and the turn of the 20th Century, with the advent of modern psychology, that artists became more cautious of physiognomic analysis. How can one forget Géricault’s powerful portrait of a kleptomaniac in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent or Van Gogh’s painting of an old French peasant, Patience Escalier, from a private collection last exhibited at the great "Van Gogh in Arles" exhibition at the Met in 1984? Let’s recall Gertrude Stein’s portrait in which many friends had complained to Picasso that it doesn’t at all look like her. Picasso’s famous remark was: "In the end she will manage to look just like it." And she did.
Perhaps, in the light of contemporary portrait painting, the issues of working from life should be readdressed, not because it is irrelevant or unfashionable to the current taste, especially when mechanical reproduction and the manual virtuosity have created the possibility hybrid quotations and all sorts of superficial readings of past art.
The works of Elizabeth Josephson, in spite of their obvious kinship with Oskar Kokoschka, Willem de Kooning or Alice Neel, seems to utterly stand alone on the other side of the track of this particular genre. While lacking the sureness of the painterly eloquence of the artists she admires, Josephson proposes a beautiful option— the resonance of her own vulnerability. In this case, it becomes her strength rather than her weakness. However slow in speed and deliberate in building the subtlety of tones or quickening of pace in becoming more spontaneous, one can find in two of her works, Janice and Ethan and Margerete, that Josephson’s handling of paint has a poetic infelicity yet it feels genuine and not overbearing with unedited form. The work in general invites a psychological response rather than a pictorial critique. I wonder, however, if the later would be an impediment to the artist’s growth?
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Artists Space
By Nancy PrincenthalJUL-AUG 2020 | ArTonic
Shocking but true: Artists Space, essential model for a generation of feisty, funky, youth-driven nonprofits, is nearly half a century old. More surprising still, initially it depended entirely on government support, at a time when both the governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and the US president (Richard Nixon, newly re-elected) were Republicans. Promising to make up for a dearth of opportunity for young artists, Artists Space’s founders rounded some up and offered them the chance to call the shots, all on the state’s dime.
The Mirror Displaced: Artists Writing on Art
By Tom McGlynnJUNE 2020 | Editor's Message
Not all artists consider themselves writers too, let alone critics. The poet Alice Notley, in reviewing a new collection of poems by Edwin Denby in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter of 1976, prefaced her review (not quite a disclaimer nor a benediction) by stating, “Poets can’t write criticism because what they understand about a poet they adore is what they themselves do or would, it is visceral—death to analyze? critics can’t write criticism because they never are knowing.”
Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America
By Sahar KhraibaniJUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen
Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America is a virtual exhibition, organized by curators Han Hongzheng and Chandler Allen, and fueled by a spike in anti-Asian sentiments, xenophobia, and discrimination as a result of COVID-19.
Artists and Writers
By Brandt JunceauJUNE 2020 | Critics Page
Authors say that writing sometimes writes itself, notably when their characters seem to speak out in their own voice. Visual artists claim a pristine silence for their own, which they prize, eye and hand alone together gladly, no words. The word that breaks that silence is often recriminatory, and resented. It came upon a scene uninvited, that should not have been witnessed. Words, they say, compromise sight, and the silent work of the eye.
