The Brooklyn Rail

A woman in profile appears calm on the deck of a sailboat in the title painting of Susan Bee’s retrospective Eye of the Storm: 1981–2023 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Unfazed by the spiraling clouds above her and the unpredictable sea below, the woman sails on. Her boat’s honey mustard sail is a right triangle—a geometric shape of stability in a seascape of unpredictability and danger.

Storm clouds spiral out from an all-seeing blue eye above the small boat. We are uncertain if the eye is watching us or the boat. Bee often positions the viewer high above the scene as if we are flying in like a hawk. The eye symbolizes the Kabbalah, a book of mysticism in Jewish tradition that attends to the essence of the divine. The simplicity of Bee’s boat and the lone figure is countered by the whipping winds and wavy seas—and hovering over the danger is the eye.

Bee’s retrospective is curated thematically by Johanna Drucker. This allows the viewer to see how Bee’s paintings connect across time and revisit themes the artist addressed earlier in her career such as feminism, climate change, art and viewer, pop culture, and fantasy. Drucker organized the show into eight themes—History, Children and Family, Self-Portraits, Feminist Pop Collage, Conflict and Drama, Metaphors, Scenescapes, and the Apocalypse. You’ll find referential paintings, decals and figures of actresses cut out from magazines and applied to the canvas. Bee uses oil stick and enamel for most of her work. When she delves into abstraction it’s never in isolation but combined with decals, collage, figures interacting across the picture plane. What ties the work together is how Bee’s paintings implicate the viewer in the scenes they depict—whether the eye of a storm cloud, the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, or a figure staring back at the viewer—we are addressed to encounter the work as an active subject while the work does something to us by looking out.

In Demonology (2018) the figure of Bee herself remains hesitant. She gives her cold purple shoulder to a consoling orange monster who tries to “have her back.” The figure rolls her eyes. Bee’s bright colors and quick but carefully considered movements show a mastery in draftsmanship. A rooster floats inside a Carolina blue circle like a coin—why? We’re not sure. Is the artist making a reference to Bob Dylan’s famous lyric, “the sun is not yellow, it’s chicken”? Or is she responding to the fact that Americans eat an average of one hundred pounds of chicken per person, and that meat production is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change? Here, the demons hold her—is she making a deal with them, or is it best to remain afraid and keep the dream of chicken? One monster has thirteen eyes but still cannot seem to fully see Bee’s figure.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pig (1983), which she painted when she was thirty-one, Bee disrupts the surface with her textural oils that look streaky and unfinished. Oil crayon leaves child-like unfilled tracks of bright teal behind her head. Here, Petunia Pig, Bee’s spirit animal growing up, scolds and demands a naked and resigned Bee to paint. Here, culture talks to Bee in her own painting. The work almost has a matte-finish—or is it time that has settled the work, as opposed to her newer paintings which shimmer?

Ahava Berlin (2012) is a portrait of Bee standing in front of the Berlin children’s home where her mother grew up. The building is dilapidated and scarred with graffiti. Bee has measured out the scene using the stonework of the building like a grid. Inside each piece of the grid is an abstract gesture—some crossing and some staying within the lines created by the crevices. One thinks of boundary crossing and how the rigid grid contains her freedom of movement. Bee’s small figure stands erect next to the arch, in noticeable discomfort at what has taken place here and the attempted cover-up time facilitates.

“Ahavah” is a Hebrew word for love and was the name of the children’s home. Her mother lived in Berlin for seven years before she went with a group to Palestine in 1934. When Bee was ten her father took her to East Berlin. Her father’s family had a tailor’s shop in Alexanderplatz. Bee brightens the haunted building with color which includes blood red gestures. Then Bee paints herself inside of it. The place her mother went to school is now a gallery and a restaurant. One can’t help but wonder if Bee is painting a cover-up of what happened here.