=?x-unknown?q?16168=3A__=28Hermantin=29Miami-Herald-Works_of_Edou?==?x-unknown?q?ard_Duval-Carri=E9_and_Adolph_Gottlieb=2C_=28fwd?==?x-unknown?q?=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Sun, Jul. 20, 2003

Art Review
Global crossing
The works of Edouard Duval-Carrié and Adolph Gottlieb, on display at the
Lowe, blend non-Western elements in their unique styles
BY ELISA TURNER
elisaturn@aol.com



Unfolding this month at the Lowe Art Museum is a tale of two painters
enthralled by African art.

For one, Adolph Gottlieb, such a fascination impelled him to create his own
language of stripped-down forms. Then he boxed these sleek little circles
and spirals into that stylish grid beloved by Modernists everywhere, as well
as by graphic designers in thrall to Martha Stewart.

For the other, Edouard Duval-Carrié, the arts of Africa are part of a messy
Caribbean mélange that becomes ever more complicated and dangerous. The
Beginning of Seeing: Adolph Gottlieb and Tribal Art at the Lowe,
incorporates paintings from the '40s and early '50s and catches the artist
on his way up, before he has reached the signature forms of his career.

Gottlieb (1903-1974) was a seminal American Abstract Expressionist, who
began collecting tribal art objects in the '30s. The so-called ''burst''
paintings of his final years, produced mainly in the '60s, condense the
disembodied eyes he appropriated from African masks and other non-Western
art into a single, fiery explosion of color with the apocalyptic overtones
of a nuclear holocaust.

Edouard Duval-Carrié: Endless Passage, also at the Lowe, is a midcareer
retrospective of sculpture and painting by Duval-Carrié, a Miami-based
artist born in Haiti. Deeply entwined throughout his art are the myths and
arresting Creole aesthetic of Haitian Vodou.

This New World religion has been stained by the bloodied history of the
Middle Passage slave trade, but it has also been fed by a stream of
astonishingly varied cultural icons, from the luridly lifelike painted
statues of saints at Roman Catholic altars to Masonic insignia to West
African temple paintings.

MIGRATION

Unlike Gottlieb, however, Duval-Carrié has a first-hand link to the
transformations African art has undergone in its passage to the New World.
He is especially taken with the ritual story-telling power these objects
possess.

For him, the most pressing master narrative is migration, an apparently
endless passing from one place to another, a journey that can chart
departure points and destinations in Africa, Haiti and the United States. In
his solo show at the Miami Art Museum three years ago, he presented a
tour-de-force installation, called Migrations, that was part Vodou temple
and part Catholic chapel.

Though it reveled in the gorgeous sparkling surfaces of sequined Haitian
Vodou flags, this work -- with its painting of one Vodou spirit morphed into
an exotic SoBe dancer -- was also fraught with tragedy. It showed that even
spirits were leaving an island mired in fatal desperation, fleeing the
legacy of leaders he has described as running the gamut from ``operetta
emperor to demented shaman.''

Mardi Gras au Fort Dimanche is an especially caustic stab at the Duvalier
dictatorship. Duval-Carrié's gripping four-part series of paintings now at
the Lowe, and on loan from the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, also
describes that passage of migration with an accuracy both fanciful and
frightening.

In the brilliant sun-drenched colors and relatively flat perspective of
tourist-friendly Caribbean landscape paintings, this series, Miloucan ou La
Migration des Esprits, is arranged to occupy one vast wall in the museum.
They aspire to the grandeur of Old Master paintings in a cathedral, and
their scenes of capture, escape and paradise despoiled resonate with
Biblical urgency.

During the '50s, Duval-Carrié grew up in an upper-class family typically
disdainful of Vodou, but one that also looked the other way when maids
appropriated leftover bottles of Anais Anais perfume for pink
cake-and-candle-stocked altars to the Vodou deity Erzulie.

''Everybody's aware of it,'' says Duval-Carrié in an interview in his Design
District studio. ``Even the priests that come from Europe. That's the first
thing they find out, that there's this whole world of the spirits.''

As the brutalities of the Duvalier regime increased, Duval-Carrié's family
fled to Puerto Rico, where he spent his teenage years, though his father
kept the family business going in Port-au-Prince, and as an artist
Duval-Carrié has returned to the island frequently.

His sumptuously layered and colored paintings are a grand mix of history,
religion and decorative arts. They offer a startling blend of transplanted
West African religious lore and 18th-century French rococo, all marbled with
tropical colors and grafted onto modern-day stories of corruption and
displacement among vistas shaded by the Haitian royal palm.

AFRICAN TIES

Erzulie, a coquettish figure the artist has painted and sculpted frequently,
may be a not-so-distant cousin to a Fon deity from modern-day Nigeria, a
figure that's a quixotic combination of motherhood and sorcery. Scholars
have looked at other threads connecting Haitian Vodou figures like Danbala
-- a serpentine spirit lushly redolent of water, wisdom and rainbows -- with
West African deities and they've discovered many family ties.

It's also possible that lwa, the Creole word for Vodou spirits, carries
linguistic links to the Fon world of ''lo'' for ''mystery,'' and to the West
African Yoruba word ''lawo,'' meaning ``secret.''

Erzulie is ''a totally Haitian spirit,'' says Duval-Carrié, ``but you can
see how French she is. She's the goddess of love, the mulatto woman born out
of the illicit relationship between the master and slave.''

However you parse the West African bloodlines of Haitian Vodou and their
passage into Duval-Carrié's painting and sculpture, it's Vodou's syncretic
layering of colors and design and sacred and secular sources that are making
the most emphatic stamp on Duval-Carrié's art.

QUIET BEAUTY

The Beginning of Seeing: Tribal Art and the Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb
is a smaller, quieter show, in which narrative is gently suppressed in the
favor of cool formal patterns that the artist often likened to inscriptions
or missives that would speak to the spirit rather than the mind.

Many of the streamlined shapes he adapts from tribal art are encased in a
slightly uneven grid, to create what he called ''pictographs.'' He found
precedents for this grid from such divergent examples as paintings by Piet
Mondrian and the cellular-like ribbon of forms woven in blankets by tribes
of the Pacific Northwest coast.

Giving this show its added eloquence are examples from the Lowe's permanent
collection, especially Gottlieb's New York Night Scene, a wonderfully
concise painting that splices pillars of skyscraper strips of color with the
earthy, slightly ragged geometries of tribal art.

Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IF YOU GO

Edouard Duval-Carrié: Endless Passage, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum
and curated by Brady Roberts, is up through Sept. 7 and The Beginning of
Seeing: Adolph Gottlieb and Tribal Art, organized by the New Britain Museum
of Art in Connecticut and curated by Sanford Hirsch, is up through July 27
at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 1301 Stanford Dr., Coral
Gables. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday;
noon-7 p.m. and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for
seniors, and free for UM students, faculty, staff and Lowe members. Call
305-284-3535 or visit www.lowemuseum.org

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