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Barbara' Adrian established her own innovative, magic realism building on the traditions maintained.by her teachers.

BY EUNICE AGAR

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. No artist creates in a vacuum. We have all had teachers and our teachers have had teachers, stretching back to the' beginning of art itself, Every time one artist looks at another's work, whether it's' an Old Master hanging in a museum or the studio sketches of a close friend, he or she is asserting and strengthening a relationship to the community of artists. That relationship between artists is easier to see in some people's work than in others. At first glance, Barbara Adrian's paintings might seem to have little to do with the works of Rubens or of Botticelli, but her magic realism comes out of a classical realistic training and a great love for accurate portrayal of the human figure,

like many New York City artists who worked in the 1950s and 1960s, Adrian' Jived. through radical . .. changes in the art community in-

which young: artists' tried to get away from tradition and create something completely new. By trying to escape from tradition, ~ough, they were simultaneously sIiowing what a strong hold past artists had on their lives. While many of the art movements were short-lived and faddish, it was the spirit of expe\1-mentlng with tradition that lived on .

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In her magic Adrian pmhl"ll'~ 'dition, using established

techniques picting figures rately, but what are, for her, tations of traditional Adrian is a rare and .

nate artist because for her creative life, she has been in a vIgorous community of who established a tradition and varied representational inspired by life In the "if-t,_11n student of Reginald later, from 1968 until teacher at 'the Art Students

in New York City. The of a richmix of precedents consistent pursuit of a vision has resulted in her magic-realist style. . Unlike many artists her never had a mid-career experience that change from abstraction to .

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156 AMERICAN ARTIST

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19k realism teachers.

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In her magic Adrian embraces dition, using established

techniques and picting figures rately, but M" .... ·'"

what are, "for her, the tations of traditional Adrian lsa rare and artist because for her

·e life, she has been imlmerli!lj gorous community of stablished a tradition of iried representational ~d by life in. the city-first nt of Regiilald Marsh's .

from 1968 until now, er at the Art Students w York City. The conabirlal ich mix of precedents and . istent pursuit of a 1 has resulted in her

>realist style. .

ilike many artists her age,

r had a mid-career .rlence that precllull"'''' ge from abstraction to

Her persistent refinement of a unique figurative style has enabled her to slowly develop haunting imagery with dense psychological overtones. Each new painting has a deeper resonance than the last.

Adrian's earliest work was strongly influenced by Reginald Marsh. She had the good fortune to . study with him from 1947 until he died in 1954. When she was sixteen, Adrian entered the Art Students League, and after waiting a few months for a place in his popular classes, enrolled with Marsh, eventually becoming his monitor and supervising his classes. While still in high school, she attended Marsh's late afternoon class, and eventually his night sessions as well, and studied with him through the summers. Later, she combined her work with Marsh with study at Columbia University (1952-54) and Hunter College (f951.;s4):

. She describes Marsh as a shy man who said very little about her painting for the first few months but

was eventually of enormous help. "He gave his students a thorough training in materials, teaching us to grind our own colors and prepare raw canvas with rabbitskin glue and white lead," she says. "He also taught us to make egg tempera, which he used in unconventional ways, applying broad washes instead of the usual small strokes." Marsh encouraged his students to study European masters for style as well as for technique, and especially admired Rubens, whom he considered the premier painter of flesh tones. Adrian describes the enormous excitement of trailing behind her teacher as he strode through the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

After Marsh's death in 1954, Adrian set out on her own, renting a cold-water flat on Fifty-ninth Street At that time, the street, from Central Park South to the Queensboro Bridge, was filted with studios. "It was a wonderful time and place to be starting out as a young painter,"

Adrian says. 'The whole area like an extension of Greenwich lage and Little Italy. There were shops, galleries, and small rants. Enormous hero sandwiches: sold for seventy-five cents. Rene·,' Bouche, Otto Botto, and David· Frledenthal, who had a studio choreographer George Balanchine's school, are some of the artists r remember." Adrian met Nevelson at a small frame shop gallery on Fifty-ninth Street

Adrian had her first show. N told her she would come to opening, and did, because she felt was important for women artists support each other.

That exciting, vibrant N\t1nnll.nih changed when the Third Avenue came down and the old stones were demolished to

way for high rise~. Adrian that other factors in the breakup the old vie boheme were the show of Pop Art at the Museum Modern Art in New York City 1960, the ensuing astron

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SEPTEMBER 1990 110

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Despite the realism of her paintings, Adrian never overstates detail, allowing her work to keep its dreamlike quality.

Above:

The Bronx Zoo, 1979-82, oll, 28 x 38. Coll801l0n Ihe &11181.

RIghi: The Silent Season:...spring,

by Will Barnet, 1967, 011, 431/4 x 33.

cenecucn the " ..

Whllney Museum

01 American Art,

New Yolk, New York.

60 AMERICAN ARTIST

prices for the work of a small of artists, and the beginning of rapid jnflation that is still with As art became big business, mercia! competition broke the old spirit of ,."'r ..... ·"'.l .... i

the cost of living made it artists to survive on a shCJestrin,sz· New York City (or anywhere for that matter) and pursue mercenary personal visions.

Despite its challenges, New City has always-been Adrian's ject. Although her work is ly universal, the city is always background, providing and concrete physical details her paintings. During the years she would often Forty-second Street at «vo or

in the morning and sit on a walk and sketch-an "ll~'U'''''' now. "Sometimes I Riker's, an all-night eatery on eth Street and Third Avenue served hearty meals of eggs or pancakes for fifty

she recalls. "I used to look at thing happening on the watch the streetlights then go back to the studio to

She still has an exciting

from that period-a canvas Marsh style-of Times nigh~ 'seething with people.

After Marsh's death, Adrian·' through a period of about finding her own way. Bishop came to her studio in the late afternoon from studio, which was located on Square. (Bishop was famous adherence to a strict nin schedule.) "She was an woman with a good ·eye,"

says. "She looked at my and said, 'Are you painting

fat man or a tall girl or a round] because you kno because Reggie [Marsh]

With that question clicked." Within a short an's personal sense of self fell into place. A few montns. she was doing the first group portraits in her individual firmly modeled figures.

Continued 011

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oil. Most of that tan and gold color is made up of raw sienna and burnt sienna. I spread out the piece. wiped off the paint, andfooled around with the whole thing. Then Ilaid iton the floor and threw turpentine on itto get those light spots. Then I began to work on the face." Explains the artist, "I think the most important thing is to let some accidents happen. I do that a lot when I'm working on an underpainting-I can leave what I like and work over

the rest" .

However open he remains during the painting process-welcoming unforeseen color combinations or marks and other accidents-Dudash remains a strong draftsman. No matter what he is creating. it is his drawIng abilitY that provides a structure for experimentation and interpretation, "Drawing all the time was a conscious decision I made early on, and drawing is something I still rely on to work things out. both professionally and for pleasure," he states. "Constantly drawing is central to the advice r would give to a young artist"

Home life

Dudash has always worked at home, which for the past twelve years' has been the small town of Moretown, Vermont. Last year. he and his wife bought a new house there, He added a six-hundred-square-foot studio to this new residence and although he says that, "it might be nice to work in solitude with no distractions," he has become quite used to living and working with his family. Dudash takes great pleasure in the give-and-take offamily life. sharing with his wife the duties of caringfor their home and raising their three children. His new studio provides a wonderful advantage in balancing thedifferentaspects of his life. " have my office there and all the room I need for painting," he says. "In the past twelve years Qf working at home. I have completed over five hundred paintings and assignments."

Dudash puts in many hours during the week. usually from nine to five on weekdays and the same on most weekends, although during busy periods he'll work mote. Yethekeeps his work plan lI.exibte during the week in order to' fulfill necessary family obligations. only to finish up many of his projects at night when his children are asleep. He is also a committed member of a nondenominational

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ADRIAN

Continued from page 61

avoids subiect matter typical of Marsh such as rounds and scenes ofeoney the Bowery.

The mysterious quality of work derives from a comomauc precise. magic-realist technique' the ambiguous activity of jects. "I portray a world that is thatit transcends reality," she wouldn't callitsurreal since alists are more concerned unconscious mind. I present day objects taken outof their Because I present them so cally, the painting becomes world." She doesn't discuss ous personal connotations works, many of portraits, leaving it to connect the mysterious

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"This is just what'comesout when I paint. Magic realism is a highly personal, emotional style."

One of her finest paintings, TlteRed Stairway, depicts the same man three times passing the single figure of a woman on opposite sides of a steep stairway. There is a wary, possibly dif· ficult relationship between the man and woman that cannot be defined with anycertalnty.Thepaintingis one of the very few for which she used photographic reference-in this case of the stairs of the Roosevelt Island tram station. "It was winter," she explains, "-impossible to draw on location. and I needed detailed information."

Adrian places figures in unusual situations, eschewing traditional standing, sitting, and walking poses, and she likes to contrast the rounded forms of the figure with angular, geometric shapes. That compositional technique led to a number of paintings offigures intertwined with jungle gyms, a few painted on round panels. Figures cllmbever and through the gridwork. In Venus and Adonis, a single head (her sister's) appears upside down atthe top ofa grid, while disembodied hands grip the bars from the bottom of the canvas.

Adrian has the unusual ability to visualize a pictorial idea. She has the complete composition with all its details clearly defined in her head before she begins a new canvas. When she has completed a painting and is searching for new ideas, she takes long walks around the city and works, often at night, on beautifully detailed drawings. She uses graphite, charcoal, and Prismacolor pencils, and sometimes paints accents, generally in vermilion, using egg tempera that she makes herself.

She starts a painting by making preliminary drawings on the canvas and working from models, progresses to a middle stage at which point she works from memory, and then com. pletes the paintings with additional assistance from' models. Often, when she has problems creating an image, she goes to . The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ''Everything has been painted," she insists. "It's all there. I search out the one or two paintings I need, study them carefully, and then go home without looking at anything else."

She prepares most ofher materials

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follow-ing Marsh's .guldellnea Mer applying glue and lead white to finely woven linen, she covers the ground with a golden tone made by mixing a thin wash of yellow ochre and raw umber. She then draws in the design and makes a grisaille underpainting in umber. She grinds her own pigments, using a palette knife and a. piece of glass to mix only the small amounts she needs at any given time. "For me, makingpaintis the only way to completely understand and profit from all the characteristics of a pigment," Adrian says. "Vermilion is my favorite color and I use iteverywhere, especially in my paintings of jungle gyms. r just couldn't paint without it" Occasionally she uses tube colors-a brand called Lefebvre-Foinet that is made in France and is no longer sold in this country. Friends buy it for her when they travel. She calls it the Rolls Royce of oil paint because of the exacting standards by which it is made. She makes her own medium from litharge, or white leadi raw, coldpressed linseed oUj and mastic varnish crystals. (It is the same mixture thatRubensused.) ~dshe uses both sable and bristle brushes, mostly rounds. She prefers real Russian sable because the brushes come to a sharp point, which makes them suitable for drawing on the canvas.

Adrian's technique depends on carefully crafted layers of paint, including many glazes, so it is very importantfor the design to be drawn in exactly from the beginning. Altera· tions are difficult and time-consuming because they must not disturb the unity of the surface. Amajorfeature of her work is the sheer beauty of the

~ luminous, pristine surface of the painting, which recalls the high sense of craft in the northern Renaissance portraits of artists such as Hans Memling and Hans Holbein. The

strength of her composition and her painting technique insure that there are no dead spots anywhere on her canvases.

Adrian lives and works in a wonderful apartment filled with books, paintings, and a plethora of objects. The richness of color and texture in her surroundings stands in marked con-

trast to' the Spartan atmosphere of many studios and contributes to her imagery. She reads authors whose work resonates with her point of vie, V; Truman Capote andpoetTed Hughes

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The Art Students League is within walking distance of her studio. After more than twenty years of teaching, . Adrian describes it as an incredible Source ofinspiration. "N 0 matter how

I feel when I go into class', I always come away invigorated," she says, "I can a1mostfeel the spirlt of all of those . old artists as soon as I walk in the main entrance." Nearly every American artist of note has passed through the League's doors at some time, including Marsh, Barnet, and John Sloan. She points out that many former teachers (there are no professors, only artists, at the League) actually made their reputations during their years there.

Most people are discomfited by art and literature that probe dream imagery and hallucinatory states. (Edgar Allan Poe, for example, was a marginal writer in his own lifetime, more admired in Europe than in this country.) Such ideas seem to demand that viewers or readers think deeply about themselves and about their problems and motivations. Partly for this reason, artists and critics who espouse realism have tended to ignore the small number of magic realists and surrealists in this country, but their perceptive version of the complexity of modem life cannot be ignored. In her jungle gym and eat's cradle pictures in particular, Adrian communicates some of that complexity and forces us to come to terms with the half conscious, unspoken conflicts in everyone.

Adrian has exhibited her work in thirty-five major museums and galleries, among them the Butler Institute of American Art, where she has a painting in the permanent collection, the Whitney Museum 9f American Art, the National Academy of Design, the Academy of Arts and letters, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Baltimore Museum. Awards include the Benjamin Altman Prize for Figure Painting from the National Academy of Design. Her present gallery is Grete Mellman, Ud., in New York City .•

Eunice Agar is a painter and contrlb. uting editor of American Artist She is repr~ented by the Ainili:atl Gallery 0/ Was"ington, DC, and has exhibited at the Glass Gallery in New York City.

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..J Journal Title: American Artist

Volume: 54 Issue: n578

MonthlYear: September 1990 Pages: p.p56(10)

Article Author: Eunice Agar

Article Title: Tradition and innovation; Barbara Adrian established her own Innovative, magic realism by building on the traditions maintained by her teachers.

Imprint: Gale General One File

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