Gallery-Going

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The New York Sun

Postmodernist art is a multifarious affair, ranging from Warhol’s silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe to Joseph Beuys’s five-day cohabitation with a coyote. But it all tends to share one quality: the artist’s detached scrutinizing of his own role as art-maker.


This stance, however, didn’t strictly begin with Postmodernism, as the Henry Monnier show at CUNY makes clear. These 70 drawings and prints present the fascinating story of a 19th-century Frenchman who, over a century before Cindy Sherman, turned himself into a living work of art.


Drawing upon his early experience as a government clerk, Monnier (1799-1877) produced hundreds of drawings, watercolors, and lithographs satirizing the Parisian bourgeoisie. He also wrote and performed dozens of vignettes that captured, with deadpan fidelity, the social behavior of the middle class. M. Prudhomme, the central character of his long-running play, became a kind of alter-ego; Mr. Monnier played him (and Mme. Prudhomme) on stage, and repeatedly drew and painted their images. The self-satisfied M. Prudhomme became famous for such nonsensical pronouncements as,”A soldier must be ready to die for his country, even at the peril of his life.”


The works at CUNY range from illustrational caricatures to incisively observed genre scenes and intimate portraits. Many make their point with poignant understatement. A lithograph from Monnier’s 1828 “Office Life” series depicts a government official granting an audience to two women; all seem dwarfed by the ornate office’s dimensions. In the undated “Two Bourgeois Women,” the two weary, well-appointed figures seem owned by their accessories; watercolor washes lend a luminous depth to the folds of their dresses. Elsewhere, several tiny pencil portraits show a wonderfully sensitive, if conventional, modeling of features.


Some titles make the social commentary more explicit. The 1856 watercolor “50 Thousand Pounds in Income, Some Egotism, No Children, and Love of Animals,” shows an overweight man patting a dog, his wife sternly looking on. Both husband and wife look remarkably like Monnier himself, and indeed in images throughout the exhibition he reappears as the central figure at soirees, or in men’s clubs and waiting rooms. For each scene, the artist has adopted a fly-on-the-wall vantage point, impassively observing himself in the midst of the action – or inaction, as the case may be.


The exhibition includes a series of portraits of Monnier by his betterknown peers, among them Daumier, Gavarni, and Nadar. The Daumier lithograph is especially vivid; its rippling contours and rich tones lend a momentous energy to Monnier’s pontificating pose. It attests to Monnier’s popularity, but also serves to highlight the relatively staid rhythms of his drawings.


And this is the peculiar aspect of his work: While engrossed in the theater of life, he seemed disinclined to use the artifices of drawing to invigorate these visions plastically on paper. His exasperated affection for his fellow Parisians comes through abundantly, but as narratives, not urgent marks. One suspects that his gestures achieved their fullest weight on the written page and the stage.


In some ways,Monnier’s work is most intriguing for the way it anticipates late-20th-century trends like performance art and identity appropriation. In a self-portrait down the wall from Daumier’s dramatic print, Monnier has drawn his own face staring out, with undisguised frumpiness, from Mme. Prudhomme’s huge bonnet. Neither self-effacing nor self-aggrandizing, the artist found an identity as a hapless, dedicated chronicler of his own niche. What could be more postmodern?


***


Small children are consumers, too – it’s just that they can only acquire things through that other demographic group, grown-ups. Fortunately, illustrated children’s books can be entertaining for 5-year-olds and parents alike, as demonstrated by UBS Gallery’s exhibition of 80 book illustrations from the Netherlands, a country with a particularly rich tradition of picture-book art.


Visitors will recognize the signature styles of some of these 14 artists, if not their names.The best known is probably Dick Bruna of “Miffy” fame, and here you can see firsthand the technique behind the minimalist rabbit first drawn by the artist in 1955. (The artist paints careful outlines on sheets of acetate, and fills in behind with colored paper.)


Mr. Bruna’s contemporaries include Fiep Westendorp, known for her strongly silhouetted, planar figures; and Max Velthuijs, writer-illustrator of the “Frog” books with their softer, more naturalistic images. Among the younger generation of artists, Jan Jutte describes animals and people with free (but tidy) lines, while Sylvia Weve’s coarser marks lend her images a nutty ferocity. Hans de Beer’s impressive watercolor-and-ink technique lends realistic volume to objects, the effect enhanced by dramatic illumination and perspectives.


My own favorites are by Friso Henstra. Another contemporary of Mr. Bruna’s, his drawings radiate a delicate but manic vigor. In one, a bugling bird, a crocodile, and a woman (wearing, it seems, the remnants of a cream pie) sprint across the page, their forms illuminated by fine ink crosshatchings and limpid watercolor washes.


Organized by the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., the exhibition is accompanied by a small, attractive catalog that reveals how these artists came from a variety of backgrounds – painting, sculpture, graphic design. All found new expression in the discreet discipline of book illustration. To a remarkable degree, their work provides clarity for young children, wittiness for older readers, and visual inventiveness for both.


Monnier until January 21 (365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th Streets, 212-817-7177).


“Dutch Treats” until February 24 (1285 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd Streets, 212-713-2885).


The New York Sun

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