Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
Better Than Nature
By John Updike
The Art of Albert Pinkham Ryder 1991
an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum September 21, 1990–January 7,
Albert Pinkham Ryder
catalog of the exhibition by Elizabeth Broun
National Museum of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Press, 344 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Albert Pinkham Ryder
by William Innes Homer, by Lloyd Goodrich
Abrams, 256 pp., $45.00
'The Art of Albert Pinkham Ryder,' at the Brooklyn Museum until January 7, 1991, is a wonderful study in the problematics of painting, and should be attended by all who take an interest, morbid or not, in American art. This show will not come round again, if only because Ryder's paintings are so fragile and festering that they are disintegrating before, as it were, our collective eyes. We are all aware that some paintings hold up better than others, and that few canvases executed before 1950 look quite the same now as they did to the artist the day he finished them, but the Ryder show brings home with a vengeance the mortality of this particular art. A section of the show is devoted to the chemistry of deterioration, with grisly enlargements of Ryder's cracking, shrinking, wrinkling, bubbling, sagging, darkening, alligatoring agglutinations of pigment. His paintings are subject to 'traction crackle,' 'varnish slide,' and 'perennial plastic flow'; they suffer from an ongoing chemical activity that insurance companies call 'inherent vice.'
Review, 3056 words
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