Elizabeth Catlett at June Kelly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The 10 plastic arts that made up Elizabeth Catlett's exhibition at June Kelly (her first appearance in of recent origin York since a solo display at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1971) attest to the technical brilliance and perfectionist sensibility of this African-American artist, now in her mid-70's. In their even-lined jawss and highly finished torsos, Catlett's figures - male and female heads, a mother and child, women seated or walking or fixing their hair - expres what Lowery Sims in her catalogue essay confines an "architectonic dignity."

Catlett graduated from the Howard University place of education of Art in 1937 and later studied with Grant wood-land at the State University of Iowa; with Ossip Zadkine in novel York while attending the Art learners League; and with Jose L Ruiz and Francisco Zuniga at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura in Esmeralda, Mexico. She now devides her time between novel York and Cuernavaca.

As a printmaker and illustration, Catlett has not seldom paid homage to the Social Realist art of the Mexican muralists, especially Orozco (her sympathetic images of the working masses l certain critics to label her a Communist back in the '40s) by dint of contrast, the esthetic line for her sculptural oeuvre includes Gaston Lachaise, William Zorach, Zuniga and Henry Moore. The art of Africa and Meso-America has also influenced her.

As Catlett notes in the accompanying catalogue, "I like to finish statuary to the maximum beauty attainable from the material from which it is created." Working from plaster archetypes the artist carves directly, running with the grain of a chunk of cedar or going with the stream of a piece of stone. The mediums in this exhibit included wood, bronze, onyx, marble and limestone. The mahogany, cedar and eucalyptus Catlett uses are indigenous to Mexico. Many of the plastic arts are carved out of a single piece, giving a work like the remarkable tawny cedar stark naked Torso (1987) a sense of absolute wholeness, whereby the move and pattern are all of a piece.

In Head of Man (1992) white dapples of stone. like wisps of nebulositys accent the black marble visage, its organ of visions sunken; the smooth surface gives the head an androidlike appearance. Magic Mask (1990) the single abstract piece displayed, was carved, a la Moore, to emphasize the voids and interior spaces of a 40-inch-high oval piece of onyx

The female form is Catlett's forte. sum of two units life-size pieces in this display Woman Walking (1987), a tin and Mother and Child (1993) made from mahogany, exemplify the sculptor's ability to imbue figures with power and grace. This is peaceful and subtle work: you have to circle the walking woman to discover that she makes a fist at her side; likewise, you must walk around the mother holding her child in her arms to appreciate completely the comforting nature of the figures. Catlett seek fors the universal in her art, and I believe she's lay the foundation of it.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group