SANTA BARBARA
“The Urban Myth: Visions of the City”at Sullivan Goss
“The Urban Myth: Visions of the City,” on view at Sullivan Goss this summer, included nearly 75 works dating from the late 19th century until the present day made by American artists at home and abroad. The gallery represents the work of several estates, several particularly well-suited to an exploration of the myths of urban modernity. While the masterworks were impressive, such as two paintings by American impressionist Colin Campbell Cooper, perhaps most interesting were the little-known surprises.
The rich and unexpected colors of Anders Aldrin’s 1933 oil on canvas, entitled Two Shoppers, depict two women standing shoulder to shoulder in heavy coats and small, elegant hats. Against the flat background of buildings rendered in shadowy reds, eggplant purple, and emerald green, the Fauvist turquoise shading of the women’s faces elevates them into bold relief; they are both of the city and separate from it. A second hidden gem from the 1930s is Nicholas Takis’ Warehouse and Ice Wagon. With deep hues and irregular angles reminiscent of Arthur Dove, Warehouse and Ice Wagon captures the feeling of bricolage that pervaded the American city, before centralized planning and renewal efforts homogenized the eccentric character of many small neighborhoods.
Dividing the exhibition into three categories, “Romantic Cities,” “Gritty Cities,” and “Deconstructed Cities,” curator Jeremy Tessmer presented impressions of the city without chronologic or geographic divisions. Despite these classifications, much of the work throughout the show also revealed a strong tendency to break into more sociological divisions. Although it is rare for a single gallery’s holdings to provide a complete historical sample, there was a sense in this exhibition that each generation has held its own relatively cohesive vision of the City. From a Baudelarian wide-eyed fascination with the City and its people in Fernand Lungren’s 1888 Central Park Promenade to increasing criticism of class divisions through the 1930s and ’40s, and finally a purging of the human subject from the urban landscape in Claude Venard’s abstract City Scape of the 1953, the show represents several dramatic shifts in artists’ attitudes towards the City.
Though “The Urban Myth” was hung in Sullivan Goss’ new contemporary galleries usually dedicated to the work of living artists, some of the strongest work was culled from the Depression-era and wartime periods. The exaggeratedly stooped postures of men returning from work in John Davies’ 1931 painting Stevenson Street or the regimented inventory of a crowd in Dorothy Sklar’s 1944 watercolor The Great Lover are standouts. These paintings maintain that the human subject is an essential element in any depiction of the City. Of the contemporary work, only Bo Bartlett’s portrait of a young black man outside a bus terminal in Santa Barbara Greyhound Station and John Francis’ painting of commuters in Fifth Avenue Stop reveal the inhabitants as they go about life in relationship to the built facade of their environment.
While the earlier works on view in “The Urban Myth” emphasized the impact of the City on its citizens, the contemporary pieces largely focused on the architectural landscape in isolation, from Matty Byloos’ 2006 abstract mixed-media piece Cube Houses, Rotterdam: Remembered Year to the picturesque vignettes of Brian Reynolds and James David Thomas. Though the inclusion of Jack R. Smith’s small-scale portraits of young urbanites represented an attempt to redraw the balance between the individual and the City, much of the contemporary work seemed to argue that the most pervasive myth of 21st century urbanity is that the City is a thing to be looked at from afar, a work of art that bears few physical traces of its creator’s presence.