At Large NEOGEO:

once you swat the buzzwords, is there really postmodernism in Maine?

Running the rapids of snappy art names can be tough paddling. Op and Pop are easy enough, but how about Neo Expresso or Neo Geo? You may be able to define

Dozier Bell's First Snow. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Bingham Gallery.

Magic Realism, but in 20 words or less, what does Post Superrealism mean? And what's the difference between Postmodern and Neo Romantic? If we have Neo Geo, will we some day have Post Neo Geo or even Neo Post Neo Geo?

And, finally, does any of it really matter? Given the speed at which buzzwords

Dennis Pinette shown before his painting Belfast Bay Night View. Photographer: Richard Norton. Alan Bray's Home of a Late Artist.

change, by the time you've gotten the hang of one, you're probably two behind. Assistant curators can crank them out faster than artists can grasp their meanings. It must be discouraging to wake up on a morning and find that your work-which was marketed under a natty little title last month-isn't so easy to sell anymore; it's tagged with the wrong name.

I don't think much of this applies to Maine art-we have a well-established pictorial tradition-but two of the termsPostmodern and Neo Romantic-are provocative. Do they have anything to do with what we see in our galleries today?

As I understand it, Postmodern when applied to contemporary painting means allusive. Postmodern paintings allude to the paintings of other times and not Maine Maritime Museum at Bath are all examples of the genre. And good ones. Each draws liberally from a thick lexicon of traditional sculptural forms.

What about Neo Romantic? To me, it means a new freedom of spirit, the right to be emotional, to express your personality regardless of established artistic stand· ards. Because it too is usually elusive, I Continued

simply to the period just past. For exam· pie, they might draw on seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes or an American Lumi· nism of a century or so ago. It is an intrigu. ing concept. In architecture, Postmodernism has given Maine a medley of rich, complex buildings. The new student cen· ter at Colby, the new police station in Lewiston-to give them their street names-the Olin Art Center at Bates, the

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207-824-2175 800-367-8884 Neo Geo (Continued)

think of Neo Romantic as an aspect of Postmodern.

Now that we have bogged ourselves down with two of the most current buzzwords, what do they have to do with Maine? Because of its eclectic and sensuous nature, I'd like to be able to report that I've found a lot of Postmodern painting in Maine. But I haven't.

If I push hard enough, I can find Postmodernist overtones in the paintings of Dozier Bell. They have a surreal quality. The impersonal, featureless landscapes receding into the far distance, the turbulent skies, the poles like lonely sentinels pursuing the horizon are real elements but in combination they exceed the actual. There is no combination like them on this planet, and so they may be said to allude to the taste for surreal art that developed in the years between the World Wars. I could do something similar with Alan Bray and his eccentric comments about nature, or with Dennis Pinette's paintings of industrial wastelands, and, if pressed, with a

few others that ntan think of. But I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it.

They fall within diverse limits that include Patt Franklin, John Laurent, DeWitt Hardy, and Joseph Nicoletti. To be fair, the list ought to be expanded further to include scores of others: the drawings of Harriet Mathews, the watercolors of Marguerite Robichoux, and even the work of Aridrew Wyeth-but you get the idea. The f~ct is that Neo Romantic is a New York term used to rationalize a return by some of its painters to landscape painting, a form that its writers have called a "lapsed genre, firmly in the control of Sunday painters."

The notion of a lapsed genre is nonsense.

Landscape painting is alive and well, Continued

Neo Geo (Continued)

and has been the essential stuff of Maine art since the middle of the last century. Almost every American landscape painter of note from the time of F)tz Hugh Lane has had a crack at our fa¢~. The Maine coast must be the most often painted parcel of real estate on the planet. Our tradition runs from Lane in an unbroken line through Bricher, the celestial Homer, Eastman Johnson, Hassam, Rockwell Kent, Frederick Judd Waugh, Sargent, Henri, all the Wyeths, Bell~ws, Prendergast, Marin, the Zorachs, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stephe'~ Etnier and Neil Welliver-,-to name an all-star team-to the excellent painters at work today. The parochialism of New York in limiting landscape painting to Postmodern allusions excludes all but the slightest interest in what's going on elsewhere.

I do not intend this short article to be an encomium to this State, but there are pas· sages in our land that are unchanged since the time of George Washington. On a snowy evening you can stand on places that have maintained their identity since the return of General Lafayette. The fabric of the old is all around us and in abundant quantity. And the sea from which we have taken our strength is a presence-grand but not trustworthy. The . artifacts of our history, our forests and coast, have been irresistibly seductive to a succession of painters for a century and a half. They have drawn from one another, built on the immediate past, and this perhaps explains the absence of Postmodern landscape painters in Maine. The past is so palpable, and the land so insistent that it is unlikely that they would reach into other ages for sustenance. The Natural Paradise-the inspiration of the first American landscape painters-can still be found here if you know how to look for it. -Phil Isaacson

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