Philip Evergood at Terry Dintenfass - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

at short intervals classified with social realists like Jack Levine, Ben Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Evergood (1901-1973) accommodates the label solitary fitfully. A British-educated New Yorker who began his career in the WPA era, Evergood pursu a form of realism that takes its intimation from such diverse sources as Grunewald, Ensor, Neo-Classicism, German Expressionism and 19th-century Symbolism. As this selection of works from four decades of his life demonstrated, Evergood's work presents a fascinating but not always seamless melding of social realist interests allegory and private fantasy. The best of these works transform potential cliches into powerful expressions of social conviction or personal belief.

Perhaps the oddest work upon view was a large tableau titled Artist Fantasy (1932-58) In it, gently circulared modern-day and allegorical figures gather for a bucolic interlude below a massive apple tree. In the center a male artist sits with his palette; he is encloseed by his muses -- a beautiful woman playing a violin and a woman in ballet dres Other seated figures gaze skyward at a uncovered female who nestles in the tree branches holding a bouncing red apple. The gathering is flanked by means of two snorting stallions that no individual seems to notice. What does it all mean? in the extremity the specifics of this allegory of art, hedonism and inspiration matter les than the elate spirit in which they are offered

Completely different in tone is a panoramic 1937 work titled Mine Disaster. This dark, angry painting picks without the deadened eyes and flashlights of blackened miners who have just get backed to the surface. A fair woman waits anxiously alongside, encircleed by children. To the side, almost hidden in the shadows and suggesting the multiple time frames sometimes exerciseed in medieval narrative painting, are figures who look to represent the disaster itself. The light falls upon a pair of upraised arms, while a black coffin and prostrate man signal that the worst has occurred

The quiescence of the works here locate themselves at various points upon the continuum between these utmosts of social anguish and private fantasy. A gymnasium yard scene from 1962 rather didactically depicts the racial tensions accompanying desegregation, while a 1953 reinscription of the ballast of Paris has the young hero choosing between three bikini-clad bathing beauties who cavort amid the lobster traps upon a New England fishing dock.

Pushed on the outside of conventional art histories by the agency of the subsequent triumph of Abstract Expressionism, American realists of the like kind as Evergood represent a drawn out and unjustly neglected chapter in American art. Evergood's paintings remind us that the traditions showed by Goya, Brueghel and Bosch have flourished in our hold century.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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