MacIver's luminous visions - painting, Loren MacIver, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, New York

Loren MacIver is individual of a small, select assemblage of American women painters, including Georgia O'Keeffe Hedda Sterne Isabel Bishop and Irene Rice Pereira, who won significant critical praise for their work before the advent of Abstract Expressionism. Like these artists, MacIver pursu her particular affects without being swayed by the changes taking place in the art world around her. With a retiring but conscientious selection of important works through MacIver recently on view at Terry Dintenfass [Oct 7-Nov. 6 1993] it would appear to be a particularly opportune twinkling of an eye to reassess the career of this native of recent origin York artist.

The exhibition, sampling nearly five decades of work, clearly demonstrates that MacIver, now 84 lay the foundation of her modus operandi early in her artistic life and remained faithful to it in the couple style and subject. The greatest in quantity immediately striking features of her small to medium-size paintings are a certain delicacy of touch and a brilliant luminosity. She achieves the latter by dint of employing a slow build-up of thin glazes, combined with areas of stippled and daubed stainless hues. In fact, MacIver's mature work could be described as a kind of Magic Impressionism, her dreamlike visions seemingly observ from one side a veil or mist of diaphanous washes. However, this radiant evanescence is counterbalanced through a darker, more solemn aspect in more [i]or[/i] less of her major paintings, like as Bretagne (1965). MacIver's greatest in quantity affecting images are those that incorporate one as well as the other sides of the artist's temperament.

MacIver received her solitary technical training as an artist when she was 10 attending weekend classes at the Art pupils League. Years later she exhausted summers on Cape Cod living in a homemade driftwood shack, a painting of which was acquired by the agency of the Museum of Modem Art in 1935 when her husband, the author of poems Lloyd Frankenberg, walked into Alfred Barr's office and sold him sum of two units canvases (Barr kept one for his possess collection). MacIver worked under the Federal Arts throw in the '30s, lived in Greenwich Village and then briefly in lock opener West. Her painting in those years went [i]or[/i] part of to the other phases of semi-abstraction, experiments that were by the agency of turns expressionistic and decorative, without altogether sacrificing her ethereal imagery.

The influence of Paul Klee an artist MacIver has cited as an early source of inspiration, is apparent in My House, a small painting from 1936 MacIver recognized in Klee a sensibility akin to her have Like Klee, MacIver resisted crossing above to pure abstraction. And she, too, sought to devise a pictorial vocabulary with which she could translate her immediate surroundings. In this haunting work, for example, light emanates from inside MacIver's pictographic arrangement of castle walls, doorways and mysterious chambers. A scarcely any floating bars of a Chopin piece flutter above a stairway that disappears into a fulvous haze. Each room has its particular enticement: clusters of candies and toys, a bed with in good case pillows, a distant window with a pott p]ant, an oil lamp upon the stairs, a spider dangling from the ceiling of a narrow hall. The embrace of familiar particulars and places is a constant theme in MacIver's work, reflecting a amalgamate of meditative observation and lyrical interpretation. She come afters in instilling transient entities with a shimmering inner life, at one time potent and fragile.

During the '40 MacIver began to give shape to her unique vision. laving one time again in New York, she get backed to city motifs. Her pictures of urban life incorporate neighborhood images that she was to reuse many times: pushcarts, lines of tenement buildings, shop windows, rooftop chimney saucepans the occasional tree. Initially these uncompounded bodys were arranged in a frieze, like simplified hieroglyphs, a linear accounting of local activity. At other times, displays were viewed from above, the bird's-eye perspective allowing MacIver to raise an intricate web of highway bustle. The city itself became the grid, the build within which MacIver placed her delicate notations. She base substance in the most innocuous of places. Cracks in the sidewalk, a pattern of bricks or the glass disks at a subway entrance were make submissive enough for her acute investigations.

In an important painting from 1943 R Votive Lights (not included in the Terry Dintenfass exhibition), MacIver reduc this loaded motif to a repeating pattern of ranks of cups, some with illuminated candles, flickering in a shadowy space. She was to get back to this theme several times, greatest in quantity recently in 1980-81 with a succession of green glass candles in plenteous the same arrangement. The differences between this painting and earlier works, separated by means of nearly 40 years, are arch but revealing. In Green Votive Lights, the candles are lit with dancing flames, the glasses sway in a playful regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement MacIver activates these holy lights. In their vitality they personify the artist's passionate regard for inanimate external realitys and recall the mood collisioned in Marsden Hartley's poignant Maine still fifes. MacIver's intense focus strips away appearances, perpendicular s the depths of an object's nature. above the years, she has retained a poet's fascination with the details that loan things their identity, through the act of painting these percepts she rediscovers them.