Art: Review: The Dance of the Painting

To lift your spirits, go one flight up at the YWCA Downtown to the Women’s Art Gallery, currently alive with the work of Kay Muir.

Muir, now in her nineties, has been making art most of her long life, with a degree in art and design from the University of Michigan and further studies — while raising four children — at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her time at the Academy was fortuitous: Paul Chidlaw and Arthur Helwig were on the faculty. And during one school year, a time that proved definitive for Muir’s art, Josef Albers taught his color theories there. These teachers provided the boat in which Muir’s art could sail.

The earliest work shown in this exhibition comes from 1966; the latest is 2005. We see new ideas being tried out, but the interest in color never falters. Helen Frankenthaler is an influence in works on un-sized canvases, which allows the paint to spread and stain. Colors sometimes coalesce as figural, for instance, in two 1966 paintings, but do not be misled. The subject is not those boys in “Boys Reflecting” or the women in “The Conversation.”

The subject is the interplay of color. Muir is fully herself in “The Dove Has Torn Her Wing,” from 1968, with forms suggested rather than defined and a favorite range of color (yellow to orange to red with any number of stops between) coming at us full blast.

A quite wonderful example of that color palette is “Autumn Grass I” — I wrote down “rose/orange/yellow/pink” and gave up, knowing I was missing nuances. “Autumn Grass I” is horizontal, wide and low; its companion “Autumn Grass II” upends the canvas for a vertical, more realistic rendering of flowery growth.

With few exceptions, Muir prefers thin paint, sometimes brushed and sometimes exuberantly applied by roller, making the texture of the canvas an element of the work. The show has been thoughtfully hung for the most part, a good example being the pairing of “Floating Squares in Pink” with “Yellow Gray ­ Blue Yellow.” The former is horizontal, the latter vertical, but swoops of color swing across the canvas in each. Muir herself has said, “The rhythms (are) invented as I go. The eye should dance over the canvas.”

Picking up on that thought, the exhibition is called The Dance of the Painting, although it is not all paintings. Collages include “Hiding Red,” in which several shades of red are partially shielded by see-through white on a black ground. There also are interesting works on paper, some from multiple editions.

In the late 1990s Muir’s palette sometimes turned darker, sometimes more literal, but her most successful works are suggestions rather than facts and boldly colored.

The YWCA’s Women’s Art Gallery, which makes the most of a lobby-like area and adjacent corridors, is a conscious effort to provide a space “for art exhibitions by and about women, to enhance their visibility and ability to succeed.” Kay Muir’s vibrant works are a testament to that idea. Grade: B+

This article appears in Nov 28 – Dec 4, 2007.