Gallery-Going

Admitting biography into a discussion of Hannelore Baron’s work risks introducing elements of pathos that the art itself does not support. Much response to her work is colored by her identity as a Holocaust survivor: The phrase tends to raise her art to a sacramental level, where it resists being seen on its own terms. Yet there is an elusive poetry to her art, which is more evocative than biographical particulars. Baron’s formal achievement commands allegiance apart from her history.Baron (1926-87) was born in Dilligen, Germany, to Jewish parents who owned a small textile shop. On Kristallnacht, she saw the shop destroyed, her home ransacked, and her father brutally beaten. Haunted by the sight of his bloody handprint on a wall, she used art as exorcism, fabricating an alternative, primordial past with its own ritual objects, totems of a self-generated innocent world.Her work was a talisman against personal memory, made with found fragments redolent of strangers. Her untitled collages and boxed assemblages yoke disorder to the antique: worn scraps of paper, cloth, string, wire, and wood, some painted with rudimentary figures or scribbled with the artist’s own runic calligraphy. Intending some primitive utopia, she succeeded in quickening a sense of time passed, of history long finished. The work invites you into dark attics fragrant with melancholy and the dust of forgotten lives.The intense emotive power of these arrangements of derelict bits stands free of any knowledge of the circumstances of their production. Her archaisms are counterfeited with great delicacy and sophistication; seemingly childlike drawing is accomplished with deliberate craft. She was a connoisseur of cunning blurs, blots, and textural subtleties. Her encased structures and the modernist ease of her compositions link her to Joseph Cornell, Anne Ryan, and the much-mythologized Eva Hesse.Through art, Baron sought a gnosis that remained secular while mimicking traditional spiritualities. As she explained, she was “looking for some kind of answer to what everything is about.” An avid reader of anthropology, archeology, the Koran, Asian philosophies – even the speeches of Chiang Kai-Shek – she sought her guide for the perplexed in a Babel of ancient traditions outside the Talmudic one she was born to. Immersed in mystical exotica, she adopted St. Anthony of Padua, patron of things lost, as her personal saint.The work displays a passion for textiles (she studied textile design in New York). Raw materials of the rag trade are the keystone of her work. Fabrics attach to wood and metal. Collages are frayed scraps mounted on larger ones in a dance between faded, outworn stuffs and modern sensibility.Baron’s retreat into an invented Paradise Regained paralleled the rejection of history that underlay the volkisch theorizing of the Nazis themselves. The swastika, too, was a talisman against encroachments on the mythic harmony of a purer past. The Aryan idyll created its own archaic foretime, taking its stand on the ruins of Norse mythology. Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi celebrant of “the Aryan-Nordic genius,” sought an Aryan ideal in the art of antiquity and beyond, into prehistory.Baron, questing after mythic time, enacted a defiant nostalgia analogous to that of her childhood tormentors: History is a mistake to be corrected by return to a past re-created in one’s own image. In this way only should Hannelore Baron’s art be viewed in the context of the Holocaust.Her work is not visionary, as often claimed; Tikkun olam (perfecting the world) is not accomplished in the past. Once lost, faith in meaning – independent of one’s shaping – cannot be found in art, no matter the intercession of saints. View these works as memento mori for each one of us, marked and mortal in uncertain times.***Will success spoil Stephen Talasnik? I fervently hope not but suspect it has already. For more than 20 years, he has been creating beautiful drawings suggestive of architectural motifs. They insinuate perspectival plans for structures that never were but seem familiar, hinting at towers, scaffolds, roller coasters, palladiums, funnels, and shards from archeological ruins.His drawings are included in a group exhibition now at Marlborough Chelsea. This is the second time I’ve seen them in a group show and the second time they bested all company, hands down. Recently, Mr. Talasnik has begun illustrating his designs with wooden maquettes-qua-sculpture. This is where the disappointment comes in. But first the drawings.Graphite images, worked on heavy paper, are traced, erased, sanded, and smudged to create a dynamic sfumato that heightens spatial and atmospheric illusion. Interplay between precise linear elements – placed at measured intervals, softened by frottage, and interrupted by shifting viewpoints – yield plausible fictions that share a puzzle-making sensibility with Cubist collage.Effects are haunting. By contrast, the wooden structures modeled on them are a letdown. Is that what these things look like? Shorn of mystery, these balsa and bamboo strips, held together with brads and epoxy, are cousin to things fathers and sons concoct in the garage.Mr. Talasnik’s decision to materialize his dream-built tectonics suggests he feels drawing is insufficient as an autonomous medium. These maquettes are less an extension of his art than the diminishment of it.Hannelore Baron until March 26 (21 E. 26th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-213-6767). Prices: $800-$15,000.“Group Show: Selected Artists” at Marlborough Chelsea until February 15 (211 W. 19th Street, at Seventh Avenue, 212-463-8634). Prices: $2,500-$16,000.

Gallery-Going

Gallery-Going

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