The Brooklyn Rail

Ruth Miller presents a very personal language of viewing in this intricate exhibition, showing how differently drawing and painting express themselves when addressing the same subjects. On the one hand, we see the complex relationship with trees that Miller established, detailing her intimacy with the natural setting that she found on the farm in Landenberg, PA, where she settled in 1959. Here, as in the charcoal-on-paper Landenberg Drawing (1960s) and in the oil sketch Two Trees, Blue Trunk (1960s), lines define portraits, mannerisms, and even attitudes of different species of trees. At the other extreme, Miller provides a rich investigation of still life painting with which she has been engaged since moving to Connecticut in the 1970s. In these paintings, we encounter the frontality of objects and images; the paintings appear capable of toppling forward onto us. Their presence is large and heavy. Perspective does not come into play. We immediately sense in all of her works the quality of close observation, visual interpretation, and near cubistic positioning that we see in Cézanne.

The ninety-three-year-old artist does not privilege abstraction over representation, even though she engages both and allows them to interact. She told Stuart Shils in a 2014 interview, “I’m interested in the presence, the weight, the mass, relationships. But it’s not about describing things. I don’t think that is enough. I think that’s nothing, really.” Neither Ab Ex gestures nor academic studio renderings, Miller’s hand is distinctive. This is most evident in her powerful painting Landenberg Trees—Moon (1971–72), in which a remarkable green plant shape rises toward the moon in what seems a divided two-part structure with a heavy black line hinting at a profile dividing the sides. Abutting the greenery at the bottom left is a small, outlined house and a denser dwelling to the right. One detects a kind of domestic drama in the composition.

In her still life paintings Miller offers a disquisition on color and shape, leading us to sometimes bewildering observations. She places us mid-autumn in her landscape paintings with rough-edged misshapen leaves and strange, albeit warm, off-tone colors, and inside seasonal gatherings of objects. She seizes the area separating the forms and holds us captive to the feelings and thoughts that are interspersed between them.

The frontality of the images in the still-life paintings forces viewers to read closely and engage with objects, pausing between their spaces as in certain Morandi still lifes. Miller’s paintings, however, possess a strong, improbable weight. And more to the point, the forms—vegetables, skulls, shells—roughly open to let us peer into their guts and read them from left to right as in Skull and Shell (2023), suggesting a narrative sequence in the movement from bright white to dark blue showing the progression of time. We detect an autumnal creepiness in these figures. Miller has pointed out:

Among the subjects I like to paint are fruit and vegetables, which sooner or later rot and decay and this gives a sense of urgency and transience to my work. It is the same with the landscape, as the light keeps changing and no two days are the same. However, I am not trying to paint transience, on the contrary, I find the longer I work on a painting the closer I get to a clear and true realization of what I am looking at, or rather how I am seeing it.

So the not-so-still still life exposes itself.

Curated by Kara Carmack, in collaboration with Dean Graham Nickson, this show exemplifies how all of Miller’s sources, training, and biography interact—her early years on New York’s Lower East Side as an artist associating with the likes of Elaine de Kooning and rooming with Pat Passlof; studying at the Art Students League and hanging out with the likes of Esteban Vicente, Philip Guston, and Jack Tworkov. Not least influential was her partnership with and marriage to the late academic, art critic, and abstract painter Andrew Forge and her life since the mid-1970s settled in Connecticut. She followed up on her straightforward landscapes of the 1960s through 2000s, enacted in plein air and turned her eye and attention to heartfelt interior tabletop landscapes by taking nature inside and building sentimental relationships among memory, light, and form. These still-life interiors are her most personal, idiosyncratic, and outstanding works.