Hannelore Baron at the Neuberger Museum and Senior & Shopmaker - Purchase And New York

"I have had what I must call a rather difficult time of it during my life," wrote Hannelore Baron in something of an understatement. Having escaped with her family from Nazi Germany as a teenager, she acquired a certain quantity of terrible memories that she was not ever really able to shake. As these sum of two units shows of several scores of her collages and collaged boxe demonstrated, however, Baron was able to deposit aside the depression, claustrophobia and illness that beset her and fashion, above a period of just 18 years before her death at 60 in 1987 a discrete and compelling material substance of work.

Baron used what was at hand--bits of grove string, fabric--expressly wishing not to waste anything. She divide [i]or[/i] sever up copper sheets, inked them and printed from them onto fix papers. Her imagery includes fragile stick figures, birds and writing: revers alphabetic characters numbers, parts of words. She was always interested in diaries and alphabetic characters and she incorporated their faculty of perception of transmitted secrets into her work.

Formally, Baron's works are closest to the collages of Kurt Schwitters, with fragmentary materials, including base texts, arranged in roughly rectilinear grids. Her distinctive space is shallow and airless, with figures and particulars pressed into a narrow plane, either physical or pictorial. uncompounded bodys are only very occasionally brightly colored, and more consistently dark and somber. It is especially unnerving to view her collaged boxe which have feeling like mementos preserved by a grieving parent--for example, a construction from 1980 in which she placed a childlike stick figure upon musical notation paper stitched to swaths or stained woven fabric Components seem carefully selected for pieces of essential information they have rather mournfully encrypted

Each work cogently presses its particular, mysterious communique. In a 1979 collage, a file of bloodred stick figures is juxtaposed to bloodr off-angle squares resembling a pavement hastily laid. The figures and the squares are put side by side in the top third of an ocher sheet, as if they have been excavated from the earth and are waiting to be identified. In the works' frontality and the way their arrangement bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos the open pages of a volume they seem to imply codfished texts even where none are not away In a 1978 work, just individual of five dark little heads is circled in r inscrutably singled without In another from 1982, tiny images, including a r bird and a man in a hat, appear in rectangular outlines like postage stamps and are smudg and overwritten with illegible body as if in cancellation. Everywhere, alphabetic characters and word-fragments stutter and fail. nevertheless this was an artist who had lay the foundation of her voice against all not divisible by 2s producing these elliptical works in abundance for her have a title to personal fulfillment (she was little shown during her lifetime).

The 40 collages upon display at the Neuberger Museum, which have stopped at a halfdozen venue above the past two years, were fix uponed by curator Ingrid Schaffner, who wrote an accompanying catalogue, for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. They will be upon view this summer (June 26-Aug. 1) at the University Art Museum, California State University, drawn out Beach.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group