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| Photo By CAM |
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Charlie Harper's "White Sands, N.M"
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Charley and Edie Harper's art makes me smile. I don't know a better way to describe its effect on me. Often called whimsical, there is something more than whimsy present in their work. The Cincinnati Art Museum's current show,
Minimal Realism: Charley & Edie Harper, 19401960, reveals this "something more" -- the artists' overriding sense of wonder at the world around them.
I couldn't help but wander through the exhibition with mixed emotions. Charley Harper passed away while the show was being organized, which left me feeling the great loss of his marvelous creativity. The work gathered here, however, stands as a celebration of what certainly was a wonderful, inspired life shared between him and his equally-talented wife, Edie.
Minimal Realism focuses on the early period of the Harpers' careers, beginning in 1947, the year both graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. The show is relatively small but filled with gems and some surprises -- a total of 24 works by both Edie and Charley hang in the gallery, augmented by smaller works displayed in a case. The exhbition shows us how the two inspired and encouraged each other, sharing an affinity for simplified forms while forging their own styles.
The Harpers married in 1947 and took a cross-country honeymoon road trip in Edie's Chevrolet. The trip, funded by Charley's post-graduate traveling scholarship, was instrumental in their artistic development. Charley's watercolor sketches demonstrate his amazement with seeing new places and landscapes and his desire to record them quickly. His signature minimalist style found its beginnings during this trip. As he expressed in his book Beguiled by the Wild, "I couldn't get a Rocky Mountain on a piece of paper without simplifying it."
"Niagara Falls," a 1952 screenprint that was likely inspired by the trip, shows the landscape from above. The line of the falls undulates across the river, white dabs of ink suggest crashing water and a tiny tightrope walker balances on a thin black line stretching across the chasm. The composition's lyrical flow of shapes and repetition of silhouetted forms would become vital to Charley's mature style.
Edie was similarly inspired by the trip. While in California, she met her favorite photographer, the renowned modernist Edward Weston, whose influence can be seen in Edie's own photography. Four silver gelatin prints in the exhibition show her predilection for uncovering beautiful simplicity in the everyday. Made in 1945, each photograph is untitled, signaling that she was not concerned with documentation but rather design.
This style carries over to her paintings as well. In her "Cat and Flowers" from 1950, the cat is pared down to its essential shapes -- triangles for ears, rectangles for the body. The yellow half-circles of the cat's eyes are echoed by the colorful semi-circular flowers scattered throughout a muted grey, tan and green field.
Both artists use inventive points of view. Like Charley's watercolors and screen prints, Edie's paintings place the viewer in odd places. "Cat in the Grass" situates us at cat-eye level. The cat stretches its elongated body across the bottom of the canvas, and long green stalks of grass sway above it against a golden field. Charley's well-known screen prints of birds also employ the use of unusual viewpoints. In "Purple Finch," for example, we hover in the air with the bird and look down on tiny houses below.
These skewed viewpoints make us see things we take for granted. We aren't looking down on the cat or up at the bird, but seeing our world from the perspective of the animals.
Edie's vibrant, large-canvas "Woodland Fauna" shows the viewer a distant human world. The animals take precedence, with rural buildings situated far on the horizon. A residual human presence exists in the forest, however, in the initials carved into tree trunks a subtle expression of people's impact upon this wildlife wonderland.
As I watched visitors to this exhibition, it became evident that the smiles on their faces came from wonder being sparked inside them. The Harpers' work makes you feel like you're seeing something for the first time. Grade: A
MINIMAL REALISM is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through Oct. 21.
