Schjeldahl, Peter; New Jersey Art at Trenton, The New York Times, November 25, 1979
THE Second Biennial of New Jersey Artists — it will be at the State Museum here through next Sunday — is the first art show in New Jersey that I've ever reviewed, and I approached frankly curious. What is a New Jersey artist?
In recent years, the term “regional art” has gained new respectability, and formerly insular New York critics have found native things to praise from Seattle to New Orleans. But what can be expected from a “region” jammed between mighty Manhattan and the lesser, but still weighty, eminence of Philadelphia?
Judging from the 115 artists represented in the Trenton exhibition, the answer seems to be: Almost anything, but particularly a high degree of tech
Although there is no great ‘spirit of place,’ there is a high degree of technical competence nical competence and a predilection for photography and realist painting.
There's no great “spirit of place,” unless an occasional view of boardwalks or of suburban sprawl qualifies. What there is is a certain alertness to tendencies in the nation's major art centers — photography and a revived realism in painting have been hot tickets throughout the 1970's — combined with a relaxed, personal and somewhat conservative overall tone.
A tending of private gardens, not an ambitious inflation, seems to be the common aim.
It is always possible, of course, that such general impressions are created by whoever selects the works to be shown, in this case from 857 entries. The jurors were Janet Kardon, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, whose tastes I do not know, and William Bailey, who teaches at Yale and whom I do know to be a distinguished painter of in tensely precise, hermetic still‐lifes.
Mr. Bailey's tastes might account for the dominance of realism in the exhibition, although the only work that seems faintly Bailey‐esque isn't realist or even a painting, but an impressive sculptural relief by Herk van Tongeren of Princeton. It is a little lead‐clad bronze chamber of geometric forms with “metaphysical” overtones.
The size of the photography contingent, reflecting this medium's recent prestige, is evidently unprecedented for this show. (The Biennial, mounted alternately by the State and Newark Museums, had a long previous history as an annual.)
Not quite a third of the works on display are photographs. Most of them, like most of the realist paintings, feature unpeopled landscape and cityscape, with a bent (unlike the paintings) for severe “formalist” composition.
I found the bulk of the photographs proficient, but rather ordinary. But there's something surefire about uninhabited boardwalk shots.
I was moved by Jonathan M. Block's and Stuart Thomas's contributions to this genre, as I was by Peteris Krumins's wintry Coney Island beach, Suzan Cook's eerie boarding‐house stairway, William C. Abramowicz's dream‐like “Hoboken Terminal” and Harry Kalish's fine, somewhat AnselAdamsish “Lone Tree Along the Shore.”
Realist painting, as I've suggested, supplies the show's largest pleasures, but one of these is technically an outsized drawing: Katia Gushue's “Blue Ridge Mountains.” Done in pencil on an eight‐foot canvas, it is a softly atmospheric, epic view of rolling, forested peaks that seem to declare color an unnecessary vulgarity.
But I also liked Mel Leipzig's painterly “The House at Night,” a sort of open‐ended story painting in which bathrobed woman awaits the viewer on the lighted porch of a suburban house.
Other high points are Richard J. Fiorino's luminous watercolor of a mobile home and William A. Griffith's watercolor of the Pulaski Skyway raked by a glaring, Charles Burchfieldlike winter light.
A particular wonderment for me was Adolf Konrad's enchantingly elegant reverie on a country estate, a kind of rebus about time and illusion that would take pages to describe adequately.
Abstract painting may not fare very well in this show — exceptions include the contributions of Lewis Rudolph, Robert Kirschbaum and Ellen K. Levy — but the sculpture is mostly abstract and mostly quite good.
There are Patricia Lay's bristling arrangement of variously glazed ceramic pyramids, Lila Ryan's totemic doodles in aluminum, Jane Teller's vaguely ritualistic arrangement of carved driftwood, Troy West's virtuoso welding and Carol D. Westfall's insouciant fiber work.
As for works with an avant‐garde flavor, Liza Nanni's seven altered photographs called “Radioactive Panels,” in which two metai sheets and a wooden frame exchange sinister effluvia in a gravel pit, are probably the most radical entry. (This, truly, is conservative exhibition, not that there's anything wrong with that.)
New York critics travel to see things they don't see at home. Thus, I don't regret the absence of New Jersey's better‐known artists, among them George Segal of New Brunswick and Catherine Murphy, Jersey City's master realist.
I do rather regret the complete lack of “naive,” down‐home painting, a frequent pleasure of regional shows that must surely have exponents in New Jersey. As it happens, absolutely every one of these 115 artists is new to me, and I'm glad to have made their acquaintance.
Most of the works on display are for sale, and most are reasonably priced. Still, red dots indicating a sale were few and far between when I saw the show. This seems a shame. In the long run, an art community is only as strong as its local support.