To enter the realm of prolific African American artist Romare Bearden is to surrender to the rhapsody of color, an exuberant concert enlivening "Romare Bearden: Storyteller," a show at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery featuring an array of dazzling collages, watercolors and prints from the 1970s and 80s.
An activist who came out of the civil rights movement and a descendent of the Harlem Renaissance, whose members W.E.B. Dubois and Langston Hughes once gathered at his parents' home, Bearden befriended the literati and famous musicians of his era. Duke Ellington was his first patron, and Branford Marsalis produced an homage to him. Though he's best known for his exquisitely composed, textured collages that have a ring-a-ding-ding jazzy quality, the artist's equally exciting explorations of printmaking are no less deserving. Case in point: "The Siren's Song" (1979), a silkscreen portrait of island revelers whose sailing ship has dropped anchor just off-shore; the vibrant color palette beckons the viewer to wade in the water.
The ghost of Picasso, the organic, puzzle-piece unity of patchwork quilts, the brightly colored cut-outs of Matisse, and African masks and motifs converge in mixed-media collage and watercolor combos like "Martinique, Rainforest Evening" (1974), where one can almost feel the balmy ocean breeze blowing off the tropical sea, and the humidity hanging heavy in the air. (Through June 21.)
"Sanctuary for Furies" (1974), oil on canvas by Leonora Carrington.
Photo: Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Women rule at Gallery Wendi Norris in two solo shows that intersect in Mexico, though the individual artists come at our neighbor to the South from very different directions. "Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist," the first show of work by this painter/novelist since her death in 2011 at the age of 94, includes paintings, gouaches and tapestries created between 1948 and 1974. Born into an upper-class British family, the unorthodox Carrington mounted a full-scale rebellion at a young age that resulted in her expulsion from two respectable schools, a perfect breeding ground for someone who would become a player in the Surrealist crowd in Paris during the late 1930s. Among its eclectic members was her lover, Max Ernst, though she fell for his art before she met the man.
In 1940, after suffering a psychotic break and subsequent institutionalization, Carrington fled from Lisbon to Mexico, where she spent the rest of her adult life, a long way from home in more ways than one. Like Carrington, the work is a multicultural brew of Spanish influences and her Irish heritage, the wild and woolly epic stories recounted by her grandmother and mother, a cast of imaginary characters she devised, and horses, an abiding motif from childhood. In her whimsical visual narratives, fairy tales, some politically charged, mingle with Celtic folklore, humans morph into fish, scorpions, gods and other fantastical creatures.
"Taming (performance documentation at sinkhole in Tulum, Mexico)" (2013), oil on canvas by Ana Teresa Fernandez. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
and Gallery Wendi Norris
"Ana Teresa Fernandez: Foreign Bodies," an exhibition of paintings and photographs, documents the artist's performances and installations. Fernandez amplifies the tense, complex U.S/Mexico border issues with feminism in oil paintings alive with incongruity such as "Erasing the Border," in which a woman in strapless black dress and high heels is fenced out by a row of intimidating iron bars. The works, some of which deconstruct her body parts or show her poking her head through the barrier ("In Between"), are derived from her performance on the Mexican side of the border, where she filmed herself painting the forbidding black bars of the fence a baby blue, a ballsy move to say the least.
The Mexican-born, San Francisco-based Fernandez, who uses her body as a corporeal battleground for explorations of repression and sexual politics, has more than a little flair for the dramatic. Wearing stilettos, she rode a white horse - a call out to Picasso's "Guernica," perhaps - into sinkholes in Mexico, an agitated journey captured in Arrastre, a series of surreal underwater stills (direct prints to silver Dibond) taken from a four-hour video of the muscular steed swimming to another shore, images that are at once earthy and mythic. A six-minute video excerpt is also on view. (Both shows run through May 31.)
Between 1917 and the 1940s, Rudolf Bauer, who started as a caricaturist and political cartoonist in Berlin, was considered a visionary abstract artist and rising star. Credited as an originator of nonobjective painting, he was a contemporary of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee, an important influence on Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, and he had Solomon R. Guggenheim as a patron and proponent. But by the 1950s, he inexplicably fell from sight - many of his artworks consigned to oblivion in the Guggenheim Museum's basement - and descended into obscurity from which he's only recently emerged. Bauer's backstory is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale. In Europe he was imprisoned by the Nazis for promulgating "degenerate art"- his Nazi fanatic sister allegedly reported him. Once in America, he was at the nexus of power struggles, litigation, tempestuous relationships and betrayals, followed by the apparent erasure of his name and artwork from history.
His rise and precipitous fall may be one of the reasons he's currently the subject of a new play by Lauren Gunderson at the San Francisco Playhouse, and the focus of "The Realm of the Spirit," a five-decade retrospective which traces his evolution from expressionism and lyricism to a more geometric abstract style. The show, a sampling of the Weinstein Gallery's extensive repository of his work, displays the art that set an aborted career in motion. It includes 100 oil paintings and works on paper, some of which obliquely reference war and its casualties. (Through April 30.)