Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola - Hardcover

Bartholomew F. Bland; Andrew Stevovich; Hudson River Museum

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0943651379 ISBN 13: 9780943651378

Publisher: Hudson River Museum, 2008

Synopsis

The first major museum exhibition devoted to the glittering themes of café society will be presented in Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola, organized by the Hudson River Museum and curated by Bartholomew F. Bland.

Andrew Stevovich, a noted contemporary figurative painter, depicts a world infused with colorful characters that gamble with demons and fate. Ordinary men and women in everyday situations and locations, restaurants and bars, at the beach, and on public transportation show us a mysterious world imprinted on their stylized faces, and ask that their stories be considered, whether melancholy, romantic, violent, or lurid.

Although Stevovich's paintings are set in the contemporary world, his crisp design, brilliant color, and meticulous surface finishes recall Renaissance works. .Stevovich paints in oil and pastel and is also an accomplished printmaker and etcher. Stylistically, many critics have commented on the relationship of Stevovich s work to that of the early Italian painters. Growing up in Washington, DC, he often visited the National Gallery of Art where he internalized the Italians bold colors and repetition of shape and form. Not surprisingly, almost all his paintings are boldly colored portraits with stylized figures, many sensuous lipped, like those in early Roman sculpture and Renaissance painting. He has never truly embraced landscape or still life.

Among the 75 works in The Truth About Lola is Popcorn, on view for the first time. A major new work, it provides insights into the artist s technique. Stevovich says, I work backwards. First I draw the faces and foreground objects, rather than beginning in the more traditional way by blocking colors. To increase the luminosity of color, Stevovich keeps his canvas as white and pure as possible, before applying color, At times, the disenchantment beneath the surface of many of Stevovich s paintings bursts into the open. Scenes of overt violence make up a comparatively small but distinct group of works in his repertoire. Discord contains one of the artist s few crowd scenes where everyone engages with each other, except the central female figure, who clutches her chest in bewilderment. The bottom of the panel is a rare instance in which Stevovich show a man threatening a woman. The man extends his fists like a boxer and the woman holds up a defensive hand. In the top left hand corner, another woman, in anguish, presses her hands to the side of her heard, recalling Munch s The Scream. This very German Expressionist-influenced work echoes the chaos depicted in canvases from the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which the artist intriguingly combines with Renaissance-like painting.

Stevovich holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts College of Art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Danforth Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. Stevovich s work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The show, organized by the Hudson River Museum, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

About this title

About the Author:

Bartholomew Bland is the curator of Andrew Stevovich: The Truth About Lola. The Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, his survey exhibitions for the museum include Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley. His upcoming exhibition, American Dreamers: Reality and Imagination in Contemporary Art will debut in 2012 at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. Other projects include the traveling exhibition A Field Guide to Sprawl, which he curated for the Arts Council of Westchester and appeared at Yale University and All Things in Time, a survey of African American artist Whitfield Lovell. He is co-author of the book Merry Wives and Others: A History of Domestic Humor Writing. In his former positions, he organized a wide range of interpretive projects for the Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.

Review:

Excerpted From an Observer Who Misses Little, Lavish Details Benjamin Genocchio, The New York Times December 19, 2008

One of the things you immediately notice about Andrew Stevovich s paintings is the old-fashioned subject matter. The scenes of couples playing cards, dancing in formal dress at a ball, or smoking and drinking in a nightclub while watching a cabaret show suggest an artist whose world view is firmly rooted in the past.

Here and there in the more than 75 paintings and drawings assembled for his first museum retrospective at the Hudson River Museum, Mr. Stevovich, who lives in Northborough, Mass., offers hints of the contemporary world around him. In one painting a cellphone rests on a table in a cafe next to an ashtray, while in another work, also a cafe scene, a woman works on a laptop computer. But over all these pictures ooze nostalgia.

The hair and clothing of the figures in his paintings recall the styles of the 1950s. Men are dressed in suits, often pinstriped and with short, narrow ties, while the women wear 1950s pencil or swing skirts, often accessorized with pearls, hats and high heels. Pastels predominate, in the color of the clothing and the décor of the interiors.

Writing in the catalog, Bartholomew F. Bland, the curator of the exhibition, outlines how the artist s background informs his work. Born in 1948 in Austria and raised in Washington, Mr. Stevovich grew up visiting the National Gallery of Art, where, it helps to know, he developed very early an appreciation for the works of Italian Renaissance painters, in particular their use of well-defined colors and full, stylized figures. His own figures are similarly colorful and stylized, so much so that individual faces and figures seem to repeat from one picture to the next. < Or maybe it is just that his faces have a very specific look. They have almond-shaped eyes, akin to the eyes on the faces of the figures in the paintings of Pablo Picasso, another important and obvious influence on the artist. Then there are the sensuous lips, full and colored light red, along with a particular and unusual kind of nose that in profile resembles the shape of a ski jump. It is especially noticeable on the women. Technically, Mr. Stevovich looks to the Renaissance artists, for their precise and delicate finishing. Each of his paintings is rendered with great care, the artist lavishing effort and concern on every line and detail, no matter how seemingly small and insignificant. Take, for instance, Twenty-One (1984), an important early painting showing a group of men and women in formal attire seated and standing around a card table. Cards are laid out face up on the luminous red velvet table, along with piles of chips. But it is the seemingly casual glances of the figures that are the real subject of this work, with each person watching another without wanting to seem as if they are doing so. Nearby is Popcorn (2008), a new major work on public view here for the first time. It shows a group of young people milling about a concession stand that is selling buckets of popcorn and soft drinks inside a movie theater, the back wall plastered with posters of gangsters and lovers. As in many of Mr. Stevovich s paintings, Popcorn includes a figure at one edge of the canvas who somehow appears to be aware of the viewer looking at him he stares right at us. This adds an interesting, unexpected psychological dimension to the work, while at the same time returning to a certain history of illusion and fantasy in art, especially in Renaissance painting, where such visual trickery is quite common.

--New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Hudson River Museum
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0943651379
• ISBN 13: 9780943651378
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144