Virginia Lynch's vivid artistic vision

October 26 - November 2, 2000

[Art Reviews]

A room with a view

Virginia Lynch's vivid artistic vision

by Bill Rodriguez
If Virginia Lynch didn't exist on the Rhode Island art scene, she would have had to be invented, and the likely candidate for that task would be the Rhode Island School of Design. But since the institution doesn't have that honor, RISD is doing the next best thing. They are presenting an exhibition looking back on the 17-year career of the energetic art gallery owner, who didn't begin her distinguished vocation until age 68.
Virginia Lynch: A Curatorial Retrospective is at the Rhode Island Foundation through December 23.
The work of so many artists has passed through Lynch's remote Tiverton gallery -- some 300 -- that the show is presenting the 80 featured artists in two stages (through November 11, and November 16 through December 23).
Success can seem inevitable in retrospect, but optimism had to suffice in the gallery's early days.
"Sometimes we were hanging on by our fingernails," says Lynch, clawing the air in front of her as she stands before her desk. Vibrant in her eighth decade, she is wearing a white blouse under a dark blue sweater, and becomes even more animated when she discusses her artists. Yet she does not assume the lofty air that her status as art doyenne could grant her. At first she begs off being photographed, preferring to fade into the background of the art in the adjoining rooms. In the charming lilt of her native Texas, she asks that her upbringing not be mentioned in the article, that 30 years here should have made her a local.
With that sort of self-effacement and sensitivity, you'd think Lynch was an artist herself. In fact, she did study to be a sculptor and earned a master's degree at the age of 45 from Baylor University, after her first marriage ended in divorce. That was when she came to Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was Dean of Women at Brandeis University for a year. There she met William Stang Lynch, a professor of English and a literary critic, whom she married. He died in 1977.
Joining the board of RISD two years later was an unanticipated prelude to opening the Virginia Lynch Gallery in 1983.
"I knew people whose work I could get. And they helped me out. They came and helped me hang," she says. "RISD's been at the inspiration of everything I've done, practically. Can't pay them enough credit."
Before Lynch opened the gallery at Tiverton Four Corners, she had been encouraged by the success of an exhibit she had put on in her Little Compton home. Of the 35 paintings by her friend Molly Luce, 17 were sold.
And why did visitors to her remote esthetic outpost not get to see work that she, a trained artist, produced?
"Frankly, I didn't think I was good enough," she admits. "Then my son came along, and he could be so much better than I was that I sort of gave up. He was a good artist."
Her son, abstract painter and sculptor Eric Dennard, died of cancer in 1993.
Now and then Lynch has noticed the talent of an unknown or little-known artist and helped them get discovered. Joseph Norman, today an internationally celebrated artist, was a bouncer at a Newport nightclub when she recognized his merit.
"I saw he could draw like a dream," she recalls of first seeing his brooding, expressionistic work. "I saw a great deal of emotion in what he was doing. He showed me some very moving pieces of work [in which] he was trying to express himself. And I felt he had an awful lot to say."
What does she look for in an artist when she thinks about representing them?
"What is he trying to say, and is he saying it well and is it worth saying?" Lynch enumerates. "All of those things. You're always looking to see what's this guy all about, what does he want to be doing? Is he able to do it, or is it all confusion, or can he bring some order into a painting -- organization or whatever?"
Lynch is asked if she wants her gallery to have a particular look.
"Yes. I want it to be a wonderful gallery, an elegant gallery," she says. "I want it to have class. I want it to be first-rate."
Of particular annoyance to her is work that is "sloppy . . . undirected or misdirected."
As busy she has been lately, Lynch has been slowed down by Lyme disease. She has had it for two years but it was not diagnosed until this past April. By late afternoon she is exhausted. Does this mean that Virginia Lynch now has an excuse to retire?
"I'll have to quit some day, I suppose, if I can't get up the stairs or I don't have a place to show work. But I'd probably do something else -- I'll show from my house or something," she says.
Which is to say, quitting would be followed promptly by unquitting.
"I would go bananas if I didn't have anything to do," she declares brightly. "That would be a total disaster."

A stellar selection
PERHAPS THE MOST striking aspect of "Virginia Lynch: A Curatorial Retrospective" is that it is so much better than it needs to be. That is to say, the artists in this first part of the exhibition have donated these works to be sold to endow a scholarship fund in Lynch's name, and they could be forgiven for not submitting their best work. However, this show glows with the energy of artists at the top of their form.
Although this is a celebration of a small gallery, the breadth and scale of the exhibition makes it seem more like a museum's retrospective. There are many art world household names here. For example, Robert Wilson is represented by a drawing, "Saint Sebastian Act I" (1988), that conveys a stage set's stately proportions in a few simple charcoal lines. Chuck Close contributed "Alex" (1992), one of his pointillistic portraits that was done as a 95-color, 47-woodblock print in the Japanese ukiyo-e technique. There are two works by Robert Rauschenberg: a colorful wall sculpture that reminds us how decorative bottle caps can be; and a silk-screen juxtaposing sports photos with other imagery.
Three-quarters of these 39 participants have Rhode Island School of Design connections, as either alumni or faculty. The usual suspects among contemporary RISD artists are well represented. To name just a few: Dale Chihuly has included one of his enormous glass nested "basket sets," red with yellow undertones, undulations frozen in time; Howard Ben Tré has a monoprint rather than one of his large public sculptures. And David Macaulay and Chris Van Allsburg have each contributed an illustration.
There are works by the late photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, both giants in the development and artistic acceptance of their medium. Siskind's "New York 20" (1976) was printed with an intentional murkiness that makes its content -- stapled and taped fragments of posters -- all the more abstract as a study of composition and texture. There are four prints by Callahan, including two of his famous studies of his wife Eleanor.
Hung with those two masters are delicate silver prints by photographer Gifford Ewing. Taken at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1997, one of the two is already a much reproduced image, with the timelessness of a classic: "Lone Buffalo" shows the massive animal immobile against a field of white, movement implied by the vertical streaks of snow against the black torso, the lines echoed by stark, bare saplings in the middle distance.
Other favorites of mine include the voluptuous oil painting "Block Island" (1998) by New Yorker cover artist Gretchen Dow Simpson, the folds of the hanging sheets as inviting to the touch as alabaster. The "Remembered Landscape" (2000) of Thomas Sgouros, who is legally blind, is as vital as a J.M.W. Turner abstract seascape, making our eyes move back and forth from the earth-tone clouds to the dark, anchoring ground. Bunny Harvey's "Vermont Wind" (1999) captures the declared movement with gestural swirls of paint that unite blurred golden meadow grass with the hills and trees in the background.
There is humor here, as well. Gayle Wells Mandle, the wife of RISD's president, good-naturedly joshes her husband with "Boss" (2000). The shirt-shaped mixed-media piece has hand-written text over textile patches, most of the messages beginning with the words "You're the boss . . ." Christiane Corbat's "Celloman" (1993) fashions a male torso into the musical instrument, its strings rising through the mouth, in a gender-equal reversal of the usual associations with the cello's curvaceous shape. RISD Dean of Fine Arts member and sculptor Jay Coogan proffers one of his signature hats, an object that remains recognizable even reduced to silhouette. This one is simplified to horizontal slivers like a CAT scan, the brittle solidity of the steel sheets in tactile contrast to the softness we associate with a felt hat.
Two artists here are have particular meaning to Virginia Lynch herself. Two wall sculptures by Eric Dennard, her late son, are compact painted shapes that display a robust imagination. And Molly Luce's "Self-portrait" (1934) is from Lynch's private collection. In the rounded social-realism style of the time, it shows a young woman, pointer in hand, conducting an art class. The painting also demonstrates Lynch's eye for quality, since Luce was the subject of the first art show the gallery owner presented.
The second part of the exhibition will be held November 16 through December 3 at the RI Foundation gallery, and will present 40 more artists, mostly younger members of the generations Lynch has represented.