Ellen Berkenblit

Ellen Berkenblit's (b.1958) drawings and paintings combine expressive mark-making and invented comic strip characters to create compositions that straddle the line between abstraction and representation. Her work has been compared to that of American proto-Pop artist Stuart Davis (1894-1964),German postmodern painter Sigmar Polke (b.1941) and German Expressionist painter Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938).

This group of new works places a recurring central figure in expressionist abstract settings. Coming out of New York's East Village and its graffiti heyday in the 1980s, Berkenblit has employed a select cast of characters in her work throughout her career. Prominent among them is the female figure featured in the four works on display here. This figure is typically depicted in profile with only minor modifications to her clothing and appearance from piece to piece. The enigmatic character is not as much an actor in a narrative as the figures in the work of fellow Graphic Content artists Edie Harper and Maybelle Stamper. Rather, Berkenblit's recurring personages behave more as a formal element from which the entire composition takes its cues. As Berkenblit states,

My work is figurative. The figures I choose have one purpose: they carry the line that I wish to draw. The figures are not symbolic; they don't represent anyone or anything in particular. They are the perfect excuse to get the first line going. Sometimes it is not the line that starts this domino effect-it can be a color. After that, it's accident built on accident-a chain reaction of select accidents.

Berkenblit's works shown here in the gallery visualize a space in which line and form direct the artistic process. This imperative directly converges with the many Modernist impulses evident in the works in Graphic Content. Drawing upon strategies that reference both popular culture and fine art, her work pulls from the early 20^th century art historical impulses to create a contemporary context where currents of high and low, abstraction and representation, consciousness and escapism overlap.

IMAGE: Ellen Berkenblit, Frankensteinia, 2007 (detail), Oil and charcoal on linen, 91 x 110 inches, Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Edie Harper

Illustrator, painter and photographer Edie Harper (b.1922) has developed a unique body of work, blending an interest in narrative illustration and black and white photography, all filtered through a Modernist lens. The works exhibited here represent a wide range of dates and reflect Edie's facility with the paintbrush and the camera. Harper's work in both mediums points to an interest in reductive forms. Like many of her Cincinnati counterparts in this exhibition, Harper was trained at the Art Academy of Cincinnati which put her in close proximity to the works of artists such as Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Aaron Siskind, who were exhibiting at the time with the nascent Modern Art Society, housed in the basement of the Cincinnati Art Museum (the Modern Art Society would change its name to the Contemporary Arts Center in 1954). Edie met her future husband, Charley Harper, while attending the Art Academy. Edie and Charley pursued similar approaches to their individual subject matter while also developing distinct styles.

Harper's photography alternates between sharp, tight compositions, painterly even in black and white, and hazy, atmospheric landscapes and natural settings. Though not essentially connected to her creative process, Harper's experience as an Army Corps of Engineers photographer documenting soil and concrete samples and various experiments for the War Department certainly furthered her interest in the microcosms visible through the camera lens. In step with her fellow Modernist photographers, Harper sought out abstract forms emerging from the man made and natural worlds and summed up her reductive approach to photography in a statement from the catalog of the 1953 exhibition Seven Cincinnati Photographers.

"In making a photograph I subtract, select until I have isolated in an 8" x 10" area a newly conceived little universe which exists as a unique experience in seeing and is in no way dependent for its meaning upon the ordinary objects whose familiar shapes inspired it."

The canvases presented here demonstrate Harper's ability to communicate the essence of complex narratives and situations using only the most minimal of visual information. Several of Harper's works that draw upon narrative traditions depict well-known stories culled from folk tales and religion, and she uses the easily recognizable tales to play with expectations. Always present, even in the most illustrational and didactic works, is Harper's distinctly Modernist perspective. Similar to her photographic strategy, Harper is able to reduce images to essential forms without painting completely abstract canvases. In one example, a simple dot and line transforms an otherwise abstract, color-field painting into a clever illustration of Jonah and the Whale.

Harper is joined in this rotation of Graphic Content by Ellen Berkenblit and Harper's contemporary and friend Maybelle Stamper. Harper and Stamper frequently visited each other's studios, and, in fact, two works by Harper in this exhibition were made in Stamper's print studio on Captiva Island, Florida. Both Berkenblit and Stamper demonstrate a looser hand and more expressive style than Harper, culling elements from other 20^th Century approaches such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Alternately using the illustrated figure as a vehicle to push a narrative, a composition or an allegory, the works here connect in an examination of diverse methodologies related to representation and abstraction.

Maybelle Richardson Stamper

Born "Mabelle" Richardson (1907-1995), Maybelle Richardson Stamper grew up in the small town of Dublin, New Hampshire. In the 1920's she studied under the painter George DeForest Brush (1855-1941). In 1927 she graduated from New Hampshire State Normal School and briefly attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Moving to New York City in 1928, she enrolled as a student in the Art Students League where she would attend until 1936. While at the League her instructors included William Zorach (1887-1966) and Kimon Nicolaides (1891-1938) the latter of whom is the subject of a portrait shown in this exhibition.

Stamper exhibited widely throughout New York City, marrying artist Wilson Y. Stamper in 1937 with whom she relocated to Ohio to teach at the Cincinnati Art Academy from 1938-1943. Changing her name to "Maybelle" she kept her married name of Stamper. In 1939, she exhibited in the New York World's Fair and in 1943, at the Cincinnati Art Museum under the auspices of the Cincinnati Modern Art Society. In the same year, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired several of her lithographs.

In 1943, the artist also took an extended trip to Captiva Island, Florida and subsequently developed an enduring passion for the tropical environment. In 1946, she moved permanently to the island while continuing to make art and exhibit in museums and galleries throughout the United States. From the late 1960's to 1990's, Stamper pursued her art, working on Captiva Island until her death in 1995.

Best known for her lithographs, many of which appear in the gallery, Stamper developed not only as a printmaker but also as a draftswoman and painter whose works employ a variety of Modernist visual languages to capture emotional intensity and deep introspection. This installation showcases the artist's stylistic experimentation with art and design, figuration, form and color, referring to elements epitomizing a range of early to mid-20th Century artistic pursuits, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism.

Similar to Surrealist Paul Klee's (1879-1940) use of the dream world for artistic inspiration, in Stamper's lithographs such as Seeds (1939) and Gifts of the Moon (1940) the artist draws upon the unconscious to arrive at highly idiosyncratic and psychologically personal imagery. In other untitled works made between 1937 and 1942 she combines the emotional intensity and non-figurative techniques reminiscent of painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) to achieve fiercely energetic and abstract compositions.

Stamper's work, and that of Ellen Berkenblit and Edie Harper presented on adjacent walls, demonstrates the many methods that emerged from the legacies of Modernism in art and design. Stamper's interests in diverse artistic ideas represent multiple strains of Modernism in the visual arts and the breadth of her drawings, paintings and prints shown in Graphic Content reflects the scope of her aesthetic variation, skill and imagination.