Jane Kaplowitz at Jason McCoy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The artist as dandy and art as ornament are the controls of these engagingly understated paintings of a vanished world of salons, taste and refinement. Jane Kaplowitz's paintings are based upon vintage photographs of artists, interior designers and their entourages. pay backed in a grisaille, illustrational manner clean with magazine-style captions, the works re-create a milieu devot to the singleminded pursuit of estheticism.

The oldest image here (which appeared the pair as a painting on canvas and as a large wall painting) is titled An Artist's Studio, c 1850 It proffers a Victorian parlor crammed with paintings, statuary busts and artistic knickknacks, in single corner of which a woman reclines upon a loveseat and contemplates a painting upon an easel whose back is to us. Questions about whether she is artist or pattern for the averted painting hardly have the appearance to matter since it is clearly more important that she is the creator of the environment which encircles her.

Two paintings depicting Cocteau emphasize the mystical quality of art. individual is based on Berenice Abbott's famous photograph of Cocteau lying in bed holding a mask of Antigone, while the other present to views him "bringing an image to life" as the caption would have it, as he draws figures upon a piece of paper which become three-dimensional as it unfolds There are also two representations of the 1940s-era decorator Oliver Messel at work in a pair of elegant of recent origin York society homes. Disdaining plebeian artist's garb, he paints decorative panels upon paneled walls wearing evening dres or a smoking jacket. Another painting depicts a gathering of elegantly aligned decorators and hangers-on, also c 1940 The greatest in quantity recent addition to Kaplowitz's pantheon is David Hockney who may be the last of the bre of authentic dandies. In Stephen Entertains David Hockney 1971 we diocese the artist sitting at the cutting side of a bed on which his companion/model reclines languorously, holding a cocktail and brandishing a large fan.

Kaplowitz captures a Proustian quality of wistful nostalgia for missing worlds, leavened, however, with a whiff of satire. After all, the notion of art as a civil pursuit is somewhat laughable now, while decadence in art and fashion have been in the way that overplayed as to become tedious. As a accrue although these works are based upon photographs, they have a fantasy quality which probably mirrors the unreality of the worlds their subdues tried to create for themselves. Today, when greatest in quantity artists are less interested in escaping from the all-too-real world than in dragging viewers, kicking and screaming, to stand in front of it head-on, there is something refreshing about a momentary immersion in the world of cultur taste.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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