A conversation in paint
See painter Ruth Weisberg create present from past at the Norton Simon Museum
By Sarah Goodrum 11/26/2008
In “Guido Cagnacci & The Resonant Image,” a new exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum, renowned Los Angeles artist Ruth Weisberg offers a compelling personal and art-historical response to a work in the museum’s collections.
Dean of USC’s Gayle Garner Roski School of Fine Arts, Weisberg works primarily in painting, drawing and printmaking. Her work is part of the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Center and the Smithsonian, and last year was showcased at the Skirball Cultural Center.
For her Norton Simon exhibition, Weisberg created a series of works in dialogue with Cagnacci’s Baroque masterpiece “Martha Rebuking Mary for her Vanity” (c. 1660), based on her visceral aesthetic reaction to the work. Though this model is a familiar one for Weisberg, who has previously produced exhibitions in response to works by William Blake and Italian Renaissance painter Titian, curator Gloria Williams Sander glowingly remarks that it’s a first for the Norton Simon.
The central figure in the Cagnacci painting is the biblical Mary Magdalene, who has put aside her finery and is being scolded by her sister Martha as two maids look on from a doorway. At the upper left, an angel casts out the figure of the devil.
Weisberg’s works draw on these figures, echoing the pairing of Mary and Martha at its center and the maids. The angel appears in several pieces alone and as a background figure.
But while the figures recall the Cagnacci, meaning in Weisberg’s works is much more fluid and mysterious, and this is central to her undertakings.
Weisberg’s project as an artist, she says, is concerned largely with history — art and Jewish history, in particular — and what she identifies as the value and elusiveness of the past that is palpable through the Cagnacci–related works.
“There’s always the possibility that things are going to dissolve,” she says, not only of this exhibit but of her body of work as a whole. “Images are constructed through memory … and I want to show that they are, rather than an everyday reality right in front of you.”
Despite their compelling enigmatic qualities, however, Weisberg’s figures in these works are startlingly present. Weisberg’s use of sallow (“Isthmus”) and pastel (“La Città Ideale”) tones, along with her graceful use of lines, gives her figures an ethereal quality — they flit like ghosts across her large, unstretched canvases and smaller prints. Although Cagnacci’s figures are fleshy and his palette is warm, the Baroque scene looks like a room full of beautiful statues when compared to Weisberg’s dynamic ghosts.
Weisberg has tapped into an interesting tension: Her pieces have a strong relationship to the Cagnacci, and yet they depart strongly from the painting that sparked their creation. These images are by no means copies, but entirely new works with their own shared visual vocabulary.
“This is a dialogue, not an imitation,” Weisberg explains. Her response to this Counter-Reformation Baroque work, heavy on Catholic morality, excludes the devil and deals with family relationships, female identity and other themes that are less tangible. “I have an affinity for many of the things he does,” she says, “but there are things I don’t see the same way, and I don’t pretend to.” And as Weisberg often does, she includes her own image and portraits of family members as hauntingly familiar actors in the new scenes.
The show is beautifully designed, with larger works hung quite high, tapestry-style. Taken together, the variations and repetitions of both pairings and single figures have a musical quality — passages are repeated as refrains, but build into a wonderfully complete work.
Although the space is densely populated by Weisberg’s images, one can always return to the Cagnacci and reflect on the power of an artwork to provoke new ideas and images, on the enduring power of the styles of the past and on the history of art itself.
Perhaps it’s the influence of the idea that these works should “resonate,” but viewers may be struck by a wonderful quality the images created by Cagnacci and Weisberg share — that these works are populated by figures which seem just about to speak and move, suspended in the moment before action. As such, the exhibition feels quiet, yet pregnant with a conversation on the verge of happening.
Ruth Weisberg: Guido Cagnacci and the Resonant Image” is on display through March 2 at the Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Call (626) 449-6840 or visit nortonsimon.org for information about classes and lectures associated with the show.
P.S. Visitors should also catch the show in the adjacent gallery, “Under the Influence: Art-Inspired Art” — a dense and deftly designed look at emulations across art history. It makes a perfect complement to “The Resonant Image.”
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