How does an accomplished Boston artist — one whose work is seen by more people than perhaps all other Boston artists combined — still manage to remain virtually unknown on her home turf? Part of me wants to say just ask Jane Goldman, but I’m not sure she could tell you. Goldman, who lives in Somerville and used to be represented by the now defunct Creiger-Dane Gallery on Newbury Street, is responsible for a piece of public art that for size alone makes the Statue of Liberty look like a deer tick. Hers is the 35,000-square-foot terrazzo floor inlay throughout the terminals at Logan Airport that depicts some 90 sea creatures, from bivalves to leviathans, in various states of aqueous display.
Parts of the Logan installation strike me as enchanting and dramatic; others register as saccharine and uncomfortably Disneyesque, but so what? For its ambition and exactitude and overall intelligence (what was the last time public art in Boston proved half as sensitive to its surroundings as Goldman’s evocation of sea life in the airport on the sea?), the project ought to earn the artist more than a smattering of local notoriety. That would seem to be especially the case in the context of her first retrospective, which is up through March 1 at Pine Manor College.
The answer to why " Twenty Years of Watercolor " at Pine Manor and Goldman’s accomplishments more generally haven’t earned greater notice points in two directions. The cultural climate in 2002 for Boston’s visual artists is one of those directions. The work of the artist herself is the other.
Back in the Cold War days there used to circulate a quip about the real difference between the USSR and the USA. Only in the Soviet Union, the joke went, could four dissenters bring on the full wrath of their government, whereas only in the United States could four million protesters go entirely ignored.
Ignoring magnitude appears to be a peculiarly American phenomenon, and it strikes me as significant among a number of forces that repress attention to Boston’s visual arts. This is a condition of blindness made all the more painful since the work being produced here, particularly in painting and sculpture, is as good as it gets anywhere.
Just as the treatment of the visual arts by the city’s government and academic institutions goes far to obscure the importance, the depth and vitality, of the larger arts scene, so too Jane Goldman’s show at Pine Manor obscures the accomplishments of one of this country’s most exciting watercolorists. I remember distinctly seeing Goldman’s watercolors for the first time years ago at Creiger-Dane. Her renditions of bittersweet — bright as oil, exact as a photograph, homespun but edgy, what Flannery O’Connor might have done had she taken up a brush instead of the pen — branded themselves on my memory for their marriage of technique and conviction. There’s a charged, moral quality to Goldman’s still lifes; it’s as if the blackness of the shadows her flowers and berries cast were at war with their corresponding blossoms and fruit.
Yet there’s not a sprig of bittersweet in the Pine Manor show, though the flora formed a regular motif in her work for a considerable period of time. And why not? All her bittersweet were sold, Goldman explained to me. In other words, the work required of a full-fledged retrospective — the time and energy and money that go into rounding up years’ worth of work from far-flung collectors and institutions. The artist was left to concoct her own collation with whatever she hadn’t sold and whatever else she’d recently produced. The result is a show that feels like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, a giant talent hampered by piddling exigencies.
Go anyway. Forget the overabundant zodiacal images with their glittery stars and luminous outlines of mythic Greek figures like Free Association/Cygnus and Lyra and Gemini — they read too much like children’s-book illustrations, wholesome and idea-riddled. Forget, too, Goldman’s exclusively water-inspired frames like Tidal Pool and Sralaggy Waterfall — pleasantly undulating, with their wispy bleeds and crowded spaces, they enjoy little of the take-no-prisoners austerity of her best work.
Instead, dwell on such wonders as the 2001 Big Yellow Orchid, a giant work, 40 by 60 inches, that suggests a meteor shower for its arching momentum and searing clarity. A tangle of leaves and branches, buds and blossoms, look as if they were about to topple out of a clear glass pitcher. And the shadows they cast, themselves a tangle of floral forms, seem as alive as the bright light that produces them. Among the many remarkable qualities of the painting is that its technical bravura never feels gratuitous; Goldman delights in her subject matter, not in her skill. The result is an almost explosive presence.
No less remarkable but entirely different in mood is the exhibit’s other showstopper, identically sized but 10 years older, Across the Roof. At first your eyes are drawn to the row of humble, single-family houses that form the background — detached, unimaginative structures of variously muted hues. You see the distant houses from roof level, presumably a second-floor window in a house on a parallel street. Spanning the lower half of the frame is a wide, flat, low-slung roof, probably of a commercial building given its apparent single-story height and the industrial-quality ventilation apparatus visible along its far side. Across its surface lie shallow puddles that have yet to evaporate from a recent summer rain.
The quiet and peace of Across the Roof, its hymn to nature with the dappled sunlight and the shimmering water, are ever so gently at odds with the even subtler suggestions of gritty, working-class reality. After all, the sun shines on dwellings that occupy the same street as the garage or the manufacturing plant whose roof you see. But the almost bucolic grandeur of the scene isn’t disingenuous so much as the celebration of a passing moment. It registers with the fleeting excitement of a patient who on waking from a deep and restorative sleep is allowed briefly to forget his illness.
WHEREAS JANE GOLDMAN’S BEST WORK is her most severe — that is, when there’s nothing watery about her watercolors — the opposite can be said of the group show at the Copley Society, where the strongest work is marked by gentility. Unfortunately, the flimsiness of the " Landmarks and Icons " premise — anything remotely iconic gets included with anything remotely structural that’s found outdoors — allows for a number of distracting combinations. In one instance, a large black-and-white photo by Jerry Russo of the closed gates of a " gated community " stands across from a Paul Maloney oil painting of a woman in a bubblegum-colored bathing suit floating on her back in a swimming pool. The icon turns out to be the woman because she’s the artist’s mother, or Mother, and the landmark is the gates, presumably because they’re on land.
Ensconced nearby in a corner behind the stairs on the gallery’s lower floor, two paintings by R. Bruce Muirhead capture the mellow despair of the artist’s adopted upstate New York. Both works depict 19th-century industrial brick buildings in one of the godforsaken cities west of Albany, yet the buildings themselves appear as if lichen were growing on them. A fog, part vapor and part organic matter, clouds their façades; the violence of yesteryear’s sweatshops stands transformed by time. A similar pentimento effect, though less nostalgic, is achieved by Robert Maloney in his colorful, complex, muted, ultimately abstract digital prints. They look like a hybrid of new maps and old advertisements, gracefully orchestrated creations that, before the advent of Photoshop, would have taken the less seamless shape of collages.
Also included in the exhibit are fine works in watercolor and gouache by Jason Brockert and no less powerful photos by Chris Bentley. Paintings by Jeff Bye, Penelope Manzella, Carol Monacelli, Gretchen Huber Warren, and Joyce Zavorskas fill out the show.
