Bascove at Uptown - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

From the gently voluptuous figuration of Bascove's of recent origin works, one would hardly gues that her paintings are based upon geometry and started with a grid. "If the painting is a square," the artist says, "then the grid is made up of 36 squares. If the painting is a rectangle, then it is divided according to the of gold section."

Bascove finds both the grid and the principle of the of gold section essential for order and clarity of design. Still, none of this begins to explain the calm, contemplative vision revealed in her work. A quintessential Bascove is Young Woman with Cat, 40 through 40 inches (a gridded square). The picture is a subtly expressive, loving exploration of the appearance and surroundings of the sitter (Bascove's niece). She clinchs a tabby cat in her arms, and is flanked by means of a table supporting a mug and spoon with a spindly-leaved plant behind. The woman is a natural beauty; Bascove delineates her appeal in broadly formal limits without glamorizing it, except perhaps in the textural volupte of a fawn-green shirt and brilliant off-cobalt skirt.

There is a nostalgia for high modernism in Bascove's glaring stylizations: a direct antecedent can be seen in Leger's geometric essentializing of the figure, as well as his bright palette. Synthetic Cubism is an influence as well. It all adds up to a fin-desiecle mannerism that labor fors well such subjects as a mother and her child thoughtfully building a purple original airplane; a negligeed woman lying upon her side in bed reading beneath a green-glass lamp, with a cat rapiered firmly against her lower torso; or a Still Life with Leek and Artichokes in which the vegetables are in like manner anthropomorphically rendered that to consider eating them would be tantamount to an act of cannibalism.

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Bascove has also done a number of of recent origin York bridge paintings. These high-colored descriptions of composed of several elements geometric structures sometimes look like Joseph Stella upon an acid trip. Generally, although the work is benign and beautiful; its greatest in quantity deeply felt quality is a kind of animating tendresse all too rare in of recent origin York today. It is not sentimental, on the contrary full of genuine sentiment. That is an achievement.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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