Harriet Shorr
"Objects of Use to Me"

January 7 - February 7, 2009

Art in America

May, 2009

Allegories from the Studio

by Lilly Wei

The large, many-splendoured painting that greeted me upon entering Harriet Shorr’s SoHo studio presented an array of shining objects positioned on a beach, waves breaking behind them, a curious juxtaposition. It is a long horizontal, her preferred format, although there are several vertical compositions in Shorr’s recent production.  The provisional title is the caption of a photograph taken of Matisse’s studio collection:  "Objects which have been of use to me nearly all my life."   Inspired by Matisse’s photograph, Shorr reveals her own collection of objects that she, too, has painted many times.

Objects which have been of use to me…serve as a summa aesthetica of her subjects over the years, as if all the actors in a play have gathered together for a curtain call, the waves behind them a metaphor for time and its inexorable passage—or merely a theatrical backdrop. The scene recalls other painters’ tributes to their studios, models and props, such as Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio:  A Real Allegory (1855) or Morandi’s sublimely transfigured bottles and underscores what has engaged Shorr from the first:  a formal and philosophical inquiry about perception that turns her paintings into questions leading to other questions.  Realism and illusion, content and form, culture and nature, the optical and the conceptual are all aspects of an essential dialectic that form the perceptual and conceptual base of Shorr’s multi-faceted paintings and propel them forward.

Shorr’s early investigations consisted of representations that she calls color field paintings because of their broad expanses of surface color with few objects and no horizon line.  In these paintings, she attempted to "negate references and concentrate on color and scale," to make abstract paintings using identifiable things and was told that it couldn’t be done. She nonetheless retained the objects. The next sequence introduced her "reflection paintings," in which the world beyond the picture plane was brought inside the painting by means of reflection, reiterating the painting’s identity as a reflection, as formal but also contiguous with reality, a mirrored image, a collaborator.

In her current work, Shorr once again combines landscape and still life. In directly opposing art (the object) and nature (the landscape) within a single painting, she links them together, makes them equivalent and reconciles them, a synthesis of the abstract and the representational.  Shorr’s vision of nature is self-conscious, her intent never simply to mimic it. What she constantly searches for are meaningful pictorial relationships and sensations.  But she seems not to be able to help herself as narrative and metaphor seep into her work by means of objects constellated and made unpredictable by associations.  "Life," as Shorr said, in another context, "slips in," at times quite blithely in paintings of dreamy, impossibly blue skies, scudding white clouds and rosy buds, at times more meditatively, intimating mortality.

The deftly, often-painted cast of Objects—many of which are repeated singly or in groups in the other works in this exhibition--includes a plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary, a Tang horseman, a regal swan as well as an assortment of lustrous, iridescent bowls and vases, some holding what are presumably artificial flowers. The whole is a bouquet of colors, a brilliant exercise in painted light. Tucked in among the objects, there is small mirror encircled by a golden frame, reflecting the neck of the swan and the blue of a sky otherwise not visible, a stand-in for all the mirrors in the history of art that remind us that art is a complicated and ambiguous parallel world, a separate reality.

The space of the painting is shallow, difficult to define, and constructed out of objects seen from subtly shifting points of view.  The scale is also inconsistent and intriguingly dissonant.  As the two orders of things—natural, artificial—resonate against each another and softly collide, the illusionism is fractured and reconstituted for what it is, a painting about painting.   In this regard, Shorr’s Objects is related to arguably the greatest of paintings about paintings: Velazquez’ Las Meninas.

The other paintings in the exhibition function similarly. One beauty is La Tasse Rose, C’est Moi, referring to Madame Bovary and Flaubert’s claim that "Emma, c’est moi."   The glowing pink of its central image, a cup and saucer, is irresistibly feminine but also fragile, insubstantial, a trick of color and light and utterly seductive. Other paintings in this show, all with their deviations from seamless realism, are more concise in their pictorial elements.  The playfully titled Sailing Away features a dark green wooded landscape in the distant background with a disproportionately large, blue and white figured bowl in front, tilted toward the picture plane, decorated with boats and seemingly also ready to embark, a cross between surrealism and magic realism.  Its meaning is not clear, but Shorr cultivates the open-ended.

What is abundantly clear, however, especially in this latest sequence of paintings infatuated with the beautiful surfaces of things, is that Shorr has gradually allowed herself to revel in her considerable mimetic gifts.  She came of age when abstraction and representation were believed to be mutually exclusive and representation ranked as the lesser of the two, a time when painting itself was dismissed by most critics.  Shorr had to come to terms with a modernist legacy on the verge of collapse as one longstanding model reluctantly made way for another.  And she did, shedding her ambivalence by degrees, acknowledging the realism of her images and their psychological or metaphoric impact.  But her impulse has always been abstract, driven by artistic process, formalist concerns—and a studio full of objects waiting to be transformed by the enchantment of paint.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who contributes to many publications in the United States and abroad.  She has written regularly for Art in America since 1982 and is a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.