What she did for love
CSI
gallery shows works by the best painter you've never heard
of, Kathleen McEnery
Staten
Island Advance - May 1, 2005
Famous painters -- Cezanne,
Cassatt, Renoir, even Matisse -- are hovering over the
current exhibition at the College of Staten Island Gallery,
a showcase devoted to a virtual unknown.
She is Kathleen McEnery
(1888-1971) and she is the best painter you've never heard
of. How come? Her life got in the way of her art. Instead
of a possibly international career, she chose a husband,
children and a home in upstate Rochester.
It's the old story: Gifted
woman (who is liable to be ignored by patriarchal powers in
any event) trades brilliance for Brillo and babies.
Naturally, however, there are unique circumstances.
Born in Brooklyn, Ms. McEnery
was already traveling to Manhattan to study with well-known
realist painter Robert Henri as a teen-ager. In 1908, she
and other students accompanied Henri to Spain on a
travel-study excursion.
When that sojourn ended, she
moved to Paris. She may not have known Cezanne or any of
the other titans of early 20th Century Paris personally,
but she knew their work and understood the decisions that
guided their approach.
After two years, she returned
to New York where two of her paintings were shown in the
most celebrated exhibition of the day, the Armory Show of
1913.
The following year, she married
a prosperous Rochester businessman and settled upstate. She
continued to paint, mostly portraits of women from her
circle of family and friends. They were mostly unsigned and
undated. After 30 years, her easel time began to shrink,
possibly due to arthritis.
Art historian Janet Wolff
"discovered" McEnery several years ago and presented her
via a big Rochester show. Ms. Wolff and Nanette Salomon,
curator of the CSI gallery, are colleagues, hence the CSI
show.
Last week, Professor Salomon
said she expected the McEnerys to be excellent. But she was
unprepared. When she and gallery director Craig Manister
unpacked the paintings, "We were speechless."
FEARLESS FLOWERS
The bright face of a young
woman in a major hat, against a nearly black ground, is the
first thing to see, just inside the gallery. It could
easily be a be a portrait by Henri or George Luks, American
artists of the so-called Ashcan School in the early 20th
century.
A little further along, the
detailed and feminine "Girl at Breakfast," is a luminous
ringer for a painting by American-born Impressionist Mary
Cassatt. Celebrity resemblances continue throughout the
show.
But McEnery is no mimic. She's
experimenting. Gradually, the "real" McEnery emerges, a
capable draftsman who was a fearless colorist. One still
life, "Pink Flowers in a Blue Bowl," attempts to do the
impossible: Put a light blue bowl of queasy pinkish/orange
zinnias against a tomato red-and-white striped
cloth.
It can't be managed with such
incompatible colors, unless that's the point. But she's
undaunted, like Matisse, who also relished this sort of
high-wire act. Ms. McEnery comes very close to pulling it
off, nearly as close as he did, certainly.
But her portraits are often the
most powerful works, incisively delineated translations of
a subject's likeness and personality that don't forfeit the
painter's modernist qualifications.
In "Man With a Moustache," a
half smile plays on the handsome face of the gold-toned
young man who is deployed against a gorgeous collision of
red, green and gold forms. Everything about this undated
paintings suggests the 1920s.
A painting probably made around
the same time, "Nude With a White Scarf," is as cool as
"Man With a Moustache," is warm, except for the naked,
draped young woman in the center. At the fleshy center of a
whirlpool of ice-blue draperies, she is thoughtfully
downcast, resting an elbow against a raised knee, one hand
clapped against her kerchiefed head.
Immediately behind her, a
neoclassical statuette of a bathing goddess offers a visual
rebuke. The statuette is calm, while the model is
agitated.
The show is so good, you may
spend hours in it without noticing. Even then, you long to
meet the artist. She's there in two paintings that offer a
window on the high-ceilinged studio she used in Rochester.
In one of them, she's smocked and standing before her
easel, painting a violinist posed, in tails, at the far
right, next to a piano.
It's the last word: Ms. McEnery
may have passed into upstate obscurity for a while. But she
didn't stop working.
By Michael J.
Fressola
Reprinted
here with permission from the
