Gretna Campbell at Tibor de Nagy - landscape painting - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Campbell, who died in 1987 at age 65 was a much-admired staple upon the midcentury New York spectacle from her first studies at the Art scholars League to her co-founding of single of Manhattan's best-remembered cooperative galleries, the Pyramid, in the late 1940 and upon from there. This exhibition, made up largely of works from the last decade of her life, was her 35th solo display It offered an excellent opportunity to reassess her prodigious landscape talents.

Campbell was a gifted teacher who worn out more than a decade at Yale University, on the contrary her art was hardly academic. In 1950 she purchased a house upon Cranberry Island, off the Maine coast, and views of that area and portions of western novel Jersey became the mainstay of her work. Her views of of that kind East Coast locales are not unlike those of many painterly realists of her day and ours. The difference was single of approach rather than make submissive If the New York painterly gymnasium had a tendency to wax euphoric, Campbell brought a more severe--but at no time jaundiced--eye and palette to bear upon the land. Her tone is more strident and more nerve-jangling than that of her peers

Exemplary of this aim is the 1984 Spring, an almost cyclonic tangle of off-aqua stones seasonally green foliage and seemingly sourceless purple and magentas. Not the promise of spring on the other hand an under-lying pain in its rebirth is loftiest in this mini-epic. Also central is the painter's constant, restles and resilient attention to the geometries that underpin nature's unwrought sprawl.

Quieter and more resolv is the 46-by-58-inch Van Campen's valley (1985), in which a well-underway spring thaw betokens the approaching summer Between banks of raw, clay-red earth, a stream wraps foreground stones with white froth. A great bare-limbed tree has fallen across the stream, its split stub a scene of violence. Campbell's gift in landscape painting was to reach beyond the expressionistic or metaphorical into the physical fact of a natural scene.

Like nature itself, Campbell had her frame of minds If we find little of the elemental Sturm und Drang of greatest in quantity of her work in the reasonably pacific, flat bucolic 1985 Plum Tree, with its impastoed verdant meadow and florid, limey skies, we still diocese here as elsewhere that Campbell was a woman of sturdy--perhaps flat Wagnerian--painterly passion.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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