December 2- 8, 2004

art

Masters of Mimicry

Andrew Jeffrey Wright's extraterrestrial take on Mona Lisa

Spector lets local artists beg, borrow and steal from the great works.

by Susan Hagen

According to Picasso, "A good artist borrows, a great artist steals." Besides being a sincere form of flattery, imitating or copying another artist's work is a common, centuries-old educational practice. Shelley Spector, owner and director of Spector gallery, had long considered organizing a show in which local artists reproduced or reinterpreted famous works of art. She was especially interested in original sources in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA)—"since over the years it has had such a big influence on so many artists"—but she decided not to be dogmatic. When a scheduled exhibition fell through this fall, she called a few Spector regulars and a few new artists and told them about her idea for "The Great (re)Masters." They got right to work.

Viewers can compare the new version with a nearby photocopy of the original, and indeed, many of the 21 artists have tried to stay very close to the form and spirit of these works. With only a small change in the composition, Sarah McEneaney has respectfully recreated the Vincent Van Gogh painting Rain in the PMA. Like Van Gogh, she looked out her window and painted a trapezoidal chunk of land enclosed by walls (urban, instead of rural) covered with a silvery sheet of rain. In his horizontally elongated painting of tiny, rock-star-like people in a vast landscape, Thom Lessner has captured the spirit of the PMA's Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks. Lessner's animals are sparse and simplified, and the reclining leopard is so relaxed, it's stretched out to double its natural length. Sarah Roche has painted two versions of Courbet's The Wave, while and Rob Matthews has made an attentive and intimate graphite drawing of Edward Hopper's Office at Night.

Other artists have reinterpreted their source in more surprising ways. Ben Woodward's Nude Descending a Staircase is particularly witty. In his decorative ink-on-paper drawing, Woodward turns Duchamp's early masterpiece in the PMA into a burly male écorché, with an animal snout and pointy ears, stepping heavily off some chunky rowhouse steps. Titian's Venus of Urbino is deftly reinterpreted by Whitney Lee using a found patterned latch-hook rug that has been partially unraveled and rewoven with yarn in subtle shades of gray, green, brown and purple. Paul Santoleri reworked Rubens' masterpiece Prometheus Bound, one of the highlights of the PMA collection, using patterns of oil derricks, expressways and architectural elements. Jim Houser's amazing compression of Fifty Days at Ilium (a series of 10 huge Cy Twombly paintings at the PMA) into eight modest panels of different shapes, painted with small symbols and handwritten words from the Iliad, is an original and fascinating interpretation.

Max Lawrence's sporty Moorish Chief.

Some artists transformed their sources even more, exploring their sociological or psychological implications. The subject of Eduard Charlemont's Orientalist painting The Moorish Chief in the PMA is re-envisioned by Max Lawrence in the bright, rich colors of gouache and resin on board as a contemporary African-American man wearing a 76ers jersey, a gold necklace and a Phillies cap. Lawrence has vested his subject with the fierce, noble expression of the original. Fay Stanford's encaustic version of John James Audubon's Snowy Owls is reminiscent of Goya—a dark and visionary interpretation of the relationship between two owls, with human features, perched in a dead tree. Mitch Gillette has transformed Michelangelo's extroverted David into an intense psychological portrait. He has drawn, using the fretful lines of red, black and blue ballpoint pen, a close-up of the head with an expression that is angry and bitter, but deeply vulnerable. Shown without the rest of his body—his greatest asset—Gillette's David is just like anyone else.

The Great (re)Masters Through Dec. 10, Spector, 510 Bainbridge St., 215-238-0840