Spotlight Reviews

RHODE ISLAND

RISD Museum/Providence
www.risd.edu/museum
Betty Woodman: Il Giardino Dipinto (The Painted Garden)

Betty Woodman, Il Giardino Dipinto (The Painted Garden), 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Max Protetch Gallery. Photo: Erik Gould.

Like the fresco that inspired it, Betty Woodman’s colorful wall installation at the RISD Museum benefits from its setting. In this case that means a gallery with enough depth and distance from the viewer to allow for the freeform installation of the sixty elements of glazed earthenware within the white space, creating sweep and gesture like a troupe of acrobats on stage.

Up close, the pleasing color combinations, ancient markings, and technical ceramic artistry can be appreciated, but the vision lies in the whole view, revealing patterns and motifs, highs and lows, like a brightly colored musical score penned to wall-size paper.

A visit to the living room of the House of the Golden Bracelet, found buried and preserved in the ash and lava of Mt. Vesuvius in Pompeii, gave Woodman the idea for the wall, which fuses the shapes of classical clay vessels and architectural features into a contemporary design.

Pots, vases, and shelves are fragmented and separated, suggesting discovered pottery shards, marking time. The work is thus abstracted, as repeating bottom balustrades convey a comic row of almost human figures, while stems, bodies, feet, handles, and spouts splinter off into stick and snake, boomerang, and wing shapes.

The installation playfully alludes to the dangling threads of art history, drawing on icons of other cultures and masters, with elements suggesting ancient Greece and Rome, Chinese dynasties, Islamic garden symbolism, the decorative arts movement in Europe—even, in shape, marking, and color, hints of Picasso and Matisse.

Betty Woodman, Mussel Server, stoneware, glaze, 1981. Marken Scholes Shedd Memorial Fund. Courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.

Somehow, despite the clear references to earlier art, the work feels refreshingly new, both deconstructing and reconstructing the often polar worlds of painting, pottery, and sculpture. Many of the pieces hang flat on the wall, with three mounted vases that act as fully functional vessels pulling the garden into an extra dimension. And it is a garden of sorts, a splendid array of fragmented color giving the abstracted effect of flowers in bloom.

Created in 1993, this is the first time the work has been shown in the United States, and RISD celebrates the occasion with some added features that give weight to the exhibition. Accompanying the installation are objects on display, selected by the artist from the museum’s permanent collection, that suggest various times and places in history, from Mycenaean to Greek, Venetian to Corinthian. The RISD Museum, like all good art museums, keeps more in storage than on display, so this is a clever way to shake the dust off some truly remarkable artifacts.

A related show of drawings by Woodman reveals the artist’s fascination with classical imagery and contemporary design. In their playful pigments and whimsical associations, the drawings are mostly independent inventions, but they bubble up from the same source of myth and making that give Woodman’s work such resonant appeal. Doug Norris