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Sarah McEneaney, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2004) ISBN 0-88454-104-5 Sarah McEneaney is central within the Philadelphia art world as a painter, teacher, colleague, and supporter of other artists’ activities and of arts institutions, large and small. While she has had solo exhibitions since 1979, this is the first published overview of her art and should make it available to the wider audience it deserves. This beautifully-produced, 74-page exhibition catalogue by the ICA features full-page color illustrations of thirty-nine of the exhibited paintings and a number of comparative works. Ten individuals contributed short essays on one painting or another, a testimony to the breadth of McEneaney’s artistic and social circles; they include poets, writers and other artists as well as several curators and art historians. The introductory essay by curator Ingrid Schaffner situates McEneaney’s art within her personal history and artistic lineage. She discusses the situation of story-telling painters, from Breughel to Kara Walker and the uneasy place of narrative painting in relation to the twentieth-century’s modernist tradition. She also discusses a number of painters whose work is of particular interest to the artist, including Florine Stettheimer, Horace Pippin, Ben Shahn, Frieda Kahlo, Alice Neel, and Sue Coe. Schaffner also discusses McEneaney’s sources in Persian and Indian miniatures and medieval illumination. McEneaney’s work is autobiographical and naive in style; much of it focuses on her activities as a painter, which not only include mixing paints, but also paying taxes. Schaffner describes both Stettheimer’s and McEneaney’s subjects as “women’s worlds, “ but she might have taken a feminist perspective further. In particular, the notion that “the personal is political” fits other women who portrayed themselves: Frieda Kahlo, Alice Neel (and artists who were not mentioned, such as Hollis Sigler and Faith Ringgold). This political aspect of autobiography is clearest in McEneaney’s paintings that refer to her rape, which occurred at home. One of these paintings (June 15, 1998, 1, 1999) reflects some of the qualities of dumb violence that Leon Golub depicted, although her self-inclusion as the object of the violence engages the viewer more painfully than Golub does. McEneaney works in tempera, which has been generally superceded by oil paint since the sixteenth century and occasionally by acrylics since the second half of the twentieth century. The catalogue includes an interview with Aella Diamantopoulos, conservator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, on tempera’s requirements, handling properties, durability and history. This includes one slight error: Daniel Thompson’s translation of Cennini’s artists’ handbook was in 1933 (not 1899); Thompson’s work and the 1934 English translation of Max Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting provided recipes for many of the American artists of the 30s and 40s mentioned by Schaffner (Marsh, Cadmus, Shahn, Tooker) who revived tempera for narrative paintings, often with overtly-political intentions. Jacob Lawrence should be added to that list. The catalogue includes the artist’s exhibition history and bibliography, and is one more significant contribution the Institute of Contemporary Art has made to documenting the art of Philadelphia.
© 2007 Andrea Kirsh and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Sarah McEneaney and Philadelphia Museum of Art |
