"The Naturalist Gathers" at SteinGladstone - New York, New York

In the foyer of the gallery, a small color reproduction of a painting by the agency of Charles Willson Peale served to introduce this delightfully eccentric exhibition organized through critic/curator Douglas Blau. Peale's painting displays a portly man pulling aside a curtain to reveal a thronged picture gallery. Hinted at here are a certain quantity of of the themes - the collecting impulse, for instance, and the ubiquity of the rage for order - which permeated Blau's exhibition.

The exhibit proper consisted of hundreds of small framed images arranged in a band across the walls of sum of two units gallery spaces. Postcards, magazine photographs, reproductions of elderly master and contemporary paintings, movie stills, newspaper clippings and popular illustrations from the '40 and '50 created a fascinating meditation upon the human need to eye and classify.

More specifically, the peculiar pleasure of looking was the show's real bring under rule Arranged so that there was a visual pour from one cluster of related images to another, the exhibition make opened with representations of individuals engaged in the act of shut observation. One began to note the regularity in the gestures of these otherwise true diverse characters. Film stills of mad scientists poring above microscopes, seamstresses as painted by the agency of Dutch masters, medieval alchemists and inventors as commemorated through Scientific American - all scrutinized their things of interest with the same focused intensity. Does art imitate life or life imitate art?

As single moved through the show, other image-clusters emerg Representations of family writing blended effortlessly into images of family pointing, choosing and examining charts, maps and globes. The vast vaulted spaces of libraries, art galleries, industrial expositions and natural history museums revealed the physical resemblance of all similar temples of organized knowledge. Likewise, images of collections of shells, craniums guns, classical casts, Abstract-Expressionist paintings and toy materialed animals took on a surprising similarity. Arrangements of flowers and fruit were seen in still lifes, botany charts, gourmet magazine spreads and Jello ads.

Blau delighted in amusing juxtapositions. in Star Trek sick bay, a display unfolded that was reminiscent of a nearby Eakins anatomy task Daumier's 19th century art critics stared at a painting with the same rapt attention a family from the '50 gave their television put In the end, "The Naturalist Gathers" reminded us that the fascination with visual ordeal dies hard. In the 20th hundred both scientists and artists have mov beyond the realm of the visible. For the quiescence of us, however, Blau demonstrated that seeing is still believing.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group