Three for the Show

Marshall McLuhan and the Carpenter Center aren't the only people interested in understanding media. This month, the Fogg Art Museum, in a continuing effort to stimulate visual investigation, is sponsoring three small exhibitions of different media--"Drawings into Prints," "Contemporary Photographs II," and "Some Recent Art."

The largest and most academically oriented of the shows, "Drawings into Prints" illustrates the media metamorphosis of artists' original sketched conceptions into resulting graphic representations, i.e., etching, engraving and lithography. By juxtaposing these original drawings with their respective prints, the Fogg shows how the artist refines, recreates, or even destroys initial images in reaching a final conceptualization.

Of these printmakers, one cannot say that they hesitated altering their first attempts but rather relished each stage of transformation--whether chrysalis or caterpillar--hoping that the eventual product would emerge in its aesthetically appropriate form. Of such able printmakers as Rembrandt, Canaletto, William Blake or Aubrey Beardsley, we cannot say that they shrunk from the beautiful as Oscar Wilde once declared of American artist James McNeil Whistler; "Ah, Whistler! Yes, wonderful of course, but, how he fears beauty! He puts a blot, a mere stain like a petal, a butterfly upon a sheet of paper and dares not touch it, lest its charm be lost. His portraits remind me of the painter in Balzac's Chefd' oeuvre inconnu, laboring his canvas for years and when he draws the curtain to show the masterpiece, lo, there is nothing."

Such timorous Victorian technique in art is not to be found in this exhibit, even though artists of about the same historical period are represented (i.e., Beardsley, Blake). Eugene Delacroix, 19th century French rebel of classicism did not fear losing the charm of his drawing. Reclining Tiger, and from his sketches of a spotted leopard and a listless, striped tiger, framed he fearful symmetry of a wide-eyed beast of prey, Tigre Royale. Where in pencil, the tiger's feet were merely misshaped ovals, in lithograph form, the cat's paws took on the stream-lined and savage spikes of track shoes. His feline groin is striped like a surreal clouded sky and reiterates the contours of the landscape.

William Turner's characteristic abstract, impressionistic style comes across more effectively in his blue and grey wash of Solway Moss, Cumberland than in the resulting brown graphic illustration; the precise lines of etching and engraving have precluded the emotion of the dynamic Turner landscape.

Rembrandt, and his gifted student Ferdinand Bol, evidence the skill of the Dutch in graphics and printmaking. With precision and clarity of lines, cross-hatching to illustrate the play of light among the characters, these two Netherlandish artists evoke the spirit and personality of Blind Tobit and of Woman in the Window with a Pear, finely etched with pear-shaped curves.

The Italians, represented by Canaletto's scenes of Venice canals, piazzas, and rooftops and Pollaiuolo's Fighting Nudes, the sole drawing attributed to him, exemplify structure and texture as only these mediteranean architects are capable of constructing. Pollaiuolo's awareness of the human anatomy and Canaletto's vision of the Venetian canals and streets are mapped in these exhibited works.

Nor are the French to be slighted when it comes to printmaking. Nicolas Poussin, Edouard Manet, and Ingres point out the diversity of techniques within any nation of artists. Ingres, a noted draftsman, excels even the Dutch in precision of detail. Poussin still tells classic and mythological narratives (The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs), but Manet, one of the fathers of Impressionism concerned with the science of how the eye saw, sketches a woman, flattened, on photographic paper, perhaps borrowed from the great French photographer of the time, Nadar, whose studio housed the first Salon des Impressionistes in 1874.

The days when Nadar used to fly in his balloon have given way to days when-people photograph Cambridge High School, Harvard Square, and Daytona Beach. "Contemporary Photographs II" incorporates many of these social landscapes into the second of the Fogg's documents on contemporary happenings in photography. Timothy Carlson '71, photographer writer on the Crimson, pictures Daytona Beach, from weekend college-beerdrinking crowds to V-formation flying birds. But Daytona isn't all beer and birds, it's sex, suds, sand and surf, and 23" Color T.V.'s for sale on beach walls. One couple, whose embrance is hidden by a towel draped over their heads, stands bare-kneed against the bumper of their car. Few draperies, in painting or in photography, say so much but show so little.

Richard Rogers '67 instructor of photography at the Carpenter Center treats couples of Harvard Square and the Cambridge Common--girls and boys, girls and girls, black on white, black on black. Yet whether All-American or all-freak, each duo stares right through the viewer: and bubbled backgrounds and textured doors set off a shallow depth of field, but a great depth of feeling.

Leslie Krims, seen recently in MIT's Being Without Clothes Show, raises the status of mutated reality from repulsion to absurd insight. A nude woman pasted with snapshots of her son sits in the corner, two teenage nudes whose bosoms become the reiteration of targets on deer posters covering the wall, a dwarf couple are dwarfed by their collie and a grey, grainy Christmas tree-we are asked to look without judging but to acknowledge the absurdity of sloping floors and stunted growth.

Burk Uzzle, a former Life photographer and current member of Magnum Photos, Inc., leads us on a tour of pop and chrome America. Oblique lines on a parking lot lead us to a lone horse-rider on blacktop; an arrow directs us past a rooster on a traffic island. Emphasizing design and pure form, Uzzle illustrates an econoline van making it a highly disciplined composition--circular wheels, white slab body that flows into each white side of the frame, and black geometric solids surround the white.

For a more romantic exhibition, "Some Recent Art" displays young American artists of the late 1960's. Larry Bell, currently one of ll Californian artists in London's Hayward Gallery, smokes plate glass with an opaque tea-like mist, and stands his box on a clear plexiglass base. Robert Irwin, another westerner, showing in Boston for the first time, projects lights on an acrylic semisphere to create an illusionistic, technological flower. David Diao and Philip Wofford texturize their canvases with drips and smudges in the Jackson Pollock tradition. Dan Christensen has painted a coil and glow like neon lights, and Larry Poons has left the confines of his precisely contoured complementary-colored dots and spews them into space. The room leaves hardedge, inhuman works to another era, and raises the question, "Has the lyrical come back to stay?"

The Fogg does not answer that question, but tells us media is here to stay.