Cornelia Foss: A Retrospective

Brough t to l i gh t

From his deathbed, goethe’s last words were famously “Mehr licht! Mehr licht!” his admirers have always interpreted it as the great man’s plea for and affirmation of the central symbol of the european enlightenment he had helped cultivate. of course, he may merely have meant for the serving girl to pull the heavy curtains wider. light remains a potent symbol of freedom, intelligence and sympathy. And it is just as surely the way the world comes to color. When things are “brought to light,” they are revealed in the way a painter works: we are allowed—sometimes even forced—to see what was there all the time but previously unnoticed. how to paint the noonday glare, the late afternoon fog . . . how are these phenomena illustrated? the slant of light on a brow or smile . . . how do these illuminate the moral character of a sitter? the paintings of cornelia Foss are one answer to these questions. to watch her at work over the course of a long career is to see an artist set herself the hard tasks. We can see her treat the landscape as a figure, the figure as a landscape. We can see her boldly sketch the lines—horizon or shoulder—that define, and then to work in the space between the lines. We see a colorist create shades we had not seen in nature and instinctively recognize as exactly what is there. For Fairfield porter, a “realist” is the artist in whose work “you recognize every detail in his painting, and the whole too, though the whole takes precedence and the detail may be only an area of color, in short, abstract.” the kind of realist Foss is knows space and pigment, appearance and geometry, design and emotion. she knows how pigment goes across the canvas and how emotion is the point of description. As her colors define the edges of things, and those edges influence the colors, so too there is a grace and spontaneity, an ease of execution that gives way to large possibilities, as in this poem by her old friend James schuyler, called “sunday”:

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