Art in Brief
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SUSAN HAUPTMAN: DRAWINGS
Forum Gallery
Can work be compelling and elegantly accomplished yet repellent at the same time? Susan Hauptman’s self-portraiture has all the fascination of a cobra, hypnotic but deadly.
Throughout her career, Ms. Hauptman has worked only on paper and only in charcoal and pastel. She is a consummate technician whose work shares features with Verism, that cold, static branch of Neue Sachlicheit (New Objectivity) portraiture now on view at the Metropolitan Museum. Her Forum show coincides with “Glitter and Doom,” which it imitates in explicit ways. Role playing, crucial to the erotic life of Weimar Berlin, repeats itself here as self-advertisement.
The most unsettling of Ms. Hauptman’s self-depictions are sanitized evocations of Otto Dix’s prostitutes rendered with Christian Schad’s glacial detachment. An attractive, elfin woman in real life, she fictionalizes herself as larger-than-life with an androgynous, nearshaven head and maison de tolérance lingerie. Her buzz-cut hair, more feminine in life, turns deliberately masculine on paper, resembling a female impersonator. Together with see-through brothel-wear, the unlovely figure suggests both disease and sexual defiance.
Her precise, dry modeling of forms (gorgeous ears and pubic hair), aptitude for transparent fabrics, and insistent frontality recall Schad. Ms. Hauptman’s husband, appearing only in profile, is a dead ringer for the transvestite who looms behind Schad’s famed 1927 portrait of Count St. Genois d’ Anneaucourt. The androgynous face and the provocative costuming of “Self-Portrait / La Perla,” nos. 1,2, and 3, summon a butch dominatrix. (Compare to Otto Dix’s 1922 watercolors “The Dream of the Sadist” or “Girl Before a Mirror.”) Weimar’s thigh-high black stockings give way to lacy, black opera gloves. With the figure in a sheer slip the effect is the same: sexual suggestion tinged with kinkiness.
New Objectivity’s small details have a narrative, critical edge that permits the full impact of the work to communicate itself. By contrast, Ms. Hauptman’s tiny details — a deliberate pinhole in the gullet of one figure, slight rouging of part of an ear on another — remain idiosyncratic.
Lacking the scathing emotional drive of New Objectivity, Ms. Hauptman’s whiff of corrosion is offered only in irony. Her work does not pretend to be about anything more than her own constructed identities. Therein lies the poison. Her imagery repeats without demur, a reigning lie of contemporary culture: We can make ourselves up as we please. The fetishized Self is hollow, drained — like a Cindy Sherman portrait — of indwelling reality. The subject has vacated its own skin.
— Maureen Mullarkey
Until January 20 (745 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street).
A CANALETTO IN ENGLAND: A VENETIAN ARTIST ABROAD, 1746–1755
Yale Center for British Art
“Canaletto in England,” at the Yale Center for British Art, is a ravishing event. Known primarily for his views of his native Venice, Canaletto is a fine artist. And yet it is possible to fill a gallery with works that do not rise very far above charming mediocrity. Such was the case at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective in 1991. At Yale, by contrast, it seems as though every painting, every drawing, and every engraving survives in a state of glowing freshness almost unheard of in works well over 250 years old.
The theme of this exhibition, as befits its venue, is the work that Canaletto did during his decade-long sojourn in England, between 1746 and 1755. During that time, he painted dazzling depictions of London and the great estates of the English countryside, as well as capricci, or imaginary landscapes, and scenes of Venice. Canaletto might serve as a test of a viewer’s critical intelligence. At one level, he is easily dismissed as a charming cityscape painter, who captured the pedantic data of urban vistas with nearly photographic accuracy. Another response, scarcely better, is to assert — accurately — that he took considerable liberties in rendering his chosen themes. But the real point of the great exhibition at Yale is that Canaletto was an incomparable practitioner of the art of painting.
In composition and in the purity of his paint textures, he is practically without peer. Consider that an entire school of Dutch painting in its Golden Age, the 17th century, arose around the craft of depicting ships at sea. This is an ancillary concern of Canaletto’s and yet, if the term will be allowed, he blows most of the Holland School out of the water. Rarely have the sinuous tackles of galleons or the black, lacquered bows of gondolas been brought to such springy life.
One more thing. There is an entire province of Old Master painting that is almost universally overlooked. In the trade it goes by the name of staffage and refers to the tiny figures hastily scribbled into the foreground of landscapes, almost as an afterthought. Few of them are worth more than a moments thought. Canaletto’s figures, by contrast, are light and effortlessly alive.
— James Gardner
Through December 31 (1080 Chapel St.‚ New Haven‚ Conn., 203-432-2800).