Bennington, Vt. — If the title, “Green Mountain Magic,” of the Bennington Museum’s main summer-fall exhibit suggests the name of a strain of Vermont craft cannabis, that would not be wholly off base, at least in a figurative sense. These are paintings that invite the mind to discover the uncanny behind the hard shell of reality, works “so meticulously rendered,” in curator Jamie Franklin’s words, “that they seem to vibrate with a crystalline clarity.” You may – you will – feel a buzz.
It was Alfred H. Barr, curator of the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Realism and Magic Realism,” who defined magic realism as “the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions.” Six of the artists represented in that exhibition – Ivan Albright, John Atherton, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Vanessa Helder, and Patsy Santo – had or would go on to have strong ties to the state of Vermont. The Green Mountain State has been a magnet for other painters, too, who have practiced magical realism, such as George Tooker, Pavel Tchelitchew, Luigi Lucioni, William Christopher, and John Semple, all of whom are included in the show.
Whether those artists’ names drop for you or not, you will find many of the artworks arresting, including one of the first on view, “Magic Glasses,” executed in 1891 by Edwin Romanzo Elmer of Ashfield, Mass. A magnifying glass rests half-inside a crystal goblet beside a window seen only through the convex lens at upright and inverted angles. The distorted autumn scene outside the window is rendered in precise detail. As an artistic and literary phenomenon, Magical Realism emerged in the late 20s and flowered into the 60s and beyond, but had its precursors, including Elmer’s painting and the long tradition of trompe-l’oeil, one of whose modern masters, the fly-fishing John Atherton, has several paintings in the show.
If some works are playful, others are profound, such as the two portraits by Ivan Albright, who moved from Chicago to Vermont in the 1960s. One, a “Fragment of a Self-Portrait” in bronze, shows the upper half of a head with a furrowed brow, expressing the burden of the body on the soul. The other, perhaps the highlight of the show, is “The Vermonter,” an oil portrait of the artist’s neighbor, a retired maple farmer (and former State Rep.), whose wizened face and wrinkled hands show the body in a state of decay, but also of repose. Franklin mentions the “ethereal glow” that seems to emanate from the subject. The real magic, of course, is supreme artistic technique. The painting, we are told, took 10 years to complete.
If you clicked on “The Trio Whose Erotic Photographs Inspired a Generation of Artists” in the New York Times back in May, you may recall that Paul Cadmus, his lover Jared French, and French’s wife, Margaret Hoening French, all three of them painters, frolicked and photographed together on Fire Island in the mid-30s and 40s, founding PaJaMa in the process. The Frenches bought a place in Hartland, Vermont, in the late 40s and summered there, inviting friends from their circle of queer artists to visit. Both Fire Island and Vermont, notes Franklin, were havens where these artists could socialize with each other and escape the constraints of mainstream culture. Cadmus’ “Shells and Figure,” with its delicately rendered, pearly, broken shell that frames a male nude as through a peephole, as another shell, perched in the sand nearby, leans in, is fraught with erotic intrigue.
George Tooker, one of those visitors to Vermont, said, “I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.” Tooker’s distinctive, muted palette appears in three works in the show, including the enigmatic “Sleepers.” He and his partner William Christopher built their own place in Hartland in the 60s, leaving the city – and the beaches – behind.
There is more, much more, including a nod to Shirley Jackson, North Bennington’s master-mistress of magical realist fiction, in this eclectically sourced and stimulating exhibition. Although Franklin has been Bennington Museum Curator for 20 years, he clearly hasn’t run out of ideas. His brief but suggestive wall labels take a fuller measure of the works on view. “Green Mountain Magic” closes November 2. Who needs a dispensary?
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Phil Holland, of Pownal, Vermont, writes regularly for The Berkshire Edge. His feature on heirloom apples of the Berkshires appears in the current issue of the Edge’s Out & About magazine.
