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Reviews
Rick Bartow: My Eye
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By Rebecca Dobkins
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Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Ore., in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002. Illustrations, photographs, bibliography. 80 pages. $19.95 paper.
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Eden Again: The Art of Carl Hall
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By Roger Hull
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Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Ore., in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002. Illustrations, photographs, bibliography. 80 pages. $19.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Henry Sayre
Oregon State University, Corvallis
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In 1998, Willamette University in Salemopened its new Hallie
Ford Museum of Fine Art in a building that architect Jon Wiener
transformed from an international-style cube — the former
U.S. West Communications building — into a jewel box–like
space designed to show off the university's increasingly significant
art collection. It was an ambitious undertaking of singular success.
Equally ambitions was the publication of two significant catalogues
of exhibitions in the new space, Rick Bartow: My Eye and
Eden Again: The Art of Carl Hull.
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It is no small undertaking to print catalogues of this quality. Both include over sixty predominantly color illustrations and substantial biographical essays that document the lives of these two Oregon artists who, on the surface, might not seem to have much in common. |
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Roger Hull, Carl Hall's colleague at Willamette University for a quarter century, narrates the story of a child (or at least teenage) prodigy from Michigan who, in 1940, sold his first painting at the age of nineteen to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. By his mid-twenties, Hall had his work in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and had been the subject of a four-page spread in Life magazine. In between, World War II brought Hall to Oregon, where he was stationed at Camp Adair, north of Corvallis, amidst the lush green reaches of a valley that seemed like Eden to him. After the war, he moved to Salem and took a job at Willamette University to support his painting. "Been in Oregon now for about six or seven months," he wrote in a letter in about 1946, "and during that time I have not met any one who has even remotely any real knowledge of art and what it means, what it is really for" (p. 22). He soon met people, mostly painters, who did have at least a clue; and by the early 1950s, he was writing regular art columns for the Oregon Statesman, aimed at helping people understand "this little thing called art" (p. 37). As Hall's career as a painter progressed, it fell into increasing obscurity. By the late 1950s he had lost New York gallery representation; and through the 1960s and 1970s, he rarely exhibited outside the region. Hull summarizes: "[He] saw it confirmed that American painting was headed in directions far from his own.... He had become a prolific anomaly that accorded with no contemporary trends, with the result that he was increasingly an outsider in his own region and on the national scene" (p. 56). Hull's is a survey, then, of the prototypical "neglected artist," the man of genius who ends up — for a complex variety of reasons having to do with what has been called "the lure of the local" — painting for himself, his family, and friends (p. 70). |
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Rebecca J. Dobkins's survey of Rick Bartow's career tells a very different story. Now in mid-career, Bartow is, as they say, "hot." That the Hallie Ford Museum was able to organize his first career retrospective is something of a coup — its close relationship with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde played a role — and the show has traveled widely and successfully across the country for the past several years. Born in 1946 to a northern California Yurok family that settled in South Beach, Oregon, near the mouth of Yaquina Bay, Bartow was raised with two identities. "I was always told," he says, "you're Indian, and the other part is that you're an artist" (p. 17). His work, in turn, is equally informed by his Indian heritage and by his fluent understanding of both art history and directions in contemporary art. He reconfigures and reinterprets the former through the filter of the latter, transforming traditional Native American images into powerfully expressionist icons in both sculpture and painting. As opposed to Hall's work, which did not accord with contemporary trends, Dobkins notes that Bartow's has been "firmly planted in the worlds of contemporary art" (p. 24). |
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Whatever their differences, these two catalogues make it clear that Hall and Bartow have much in common, including their mutual love of and connection to the Oregon landscape. Their work also shares a certain shamanistic quality. Bartow's is almost literally a form of healing. "His art is not so much about his struggles," Dobkins explains, "as a way through them." Hall — who, incidentally, was a passionate student of Northwest Coast Native American art and often included Native American symbols in his work — was rather too easily labeled a Magic Realist. His work, however, suggests he has somehow made contact with a sort of supernatural force that lies at the heart of nature, especially in the knotted branches and limbs that are his hallmark. Hall probably expressed it best in an essay written in the 1950s: "This is what our Northwest artist is striving for — control of his environment by intuitive means that visualize themselves in concrete symbols that, while expressive of the region, are completely individual, essentially the reactions of one individual against the expanse of a beautiful and mysterious environment" (p. 40). As these two fine catalogues enjoy national and international distribution, the unique and mysterious face of this region can finally begin to be seen, as if peeking out from behind one of Bartow's masks. |
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