The New Republic: Books &
Arts
04/28/11
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ A NOTE FROM ISAAC CHOTINER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF THE BOOK
Life Lessons From the Ecstatic, Hegelian Work of Painter Leland Bell Jed Perl
Some men and women are so gloriously alive
that even years after their deaths it is difficult to believe they are no longer
with us. That is how I feel about the painter Leland Bell, who died of leukemia
in 1991 at the age of 69. Lee’s great theme was vitality, gusto. To make a
painting was his way of celebrating the life force. He worked on his canvases
incessantly, obsessively, infusing his finest figure compositions with the
rhythmic exuberance of chromatic harlequinades.
Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York has half a dozen of these daring, uncategorizable paintings gathered together in one big, square room until May 21. And they are still as wonderfully strange as they were when I first saw some of them, more than 20 years ago. Nothing goes together, at least not in any predictable way. The subjects are minor domestic dramas. But they are treated grandiosely, mythologically, hieratically, almost abstractly. The excitement is in the dissonance, in the tension between Bell’s strongly shaped figures and his flat planes of high-keyed color. In the greatest painting here—Family Group with Butterfly (1986-90)—three figures gathered around a table gesture at a butterfly that’s entered the room. Bell revels in the long horizontal format. He builds a syncopated rhythm out of unfurling lines and colors. The mood is almost impossible to pin down, at once comic and grave, buoyant and solid, obvious and mysterious. Bell trumps the ordinary story. Nothing is what it appears to be. There is a dialectical profundity about Bell’s children’s book simplifications. Family Group with Butterfly is an everyday epic.
Continue reading "Life Lessons From the Ecstatic, Hegelian Work of Painter Leland Bell"
04/28/11
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ A NOTE FROM ISAAC CHOTINER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF THE BOOK
Life Lessons From the Ecstatic, Hegelian Work of Painter Leland Bell Jed Perl
Some men and women are so gloriously alive
that even years after their deaths it is difficult to believe they are no longer
with us. That is how I feel about the painter Leland Bell, who died of leukemia
in 1991 at the age of 69. Lee’s great theme was vitality, gusto. To make a
painting was his way of celebrating the life force. He worked on his canvases
incessantly, obsessively, infusing his finest figure compositions with the
rhythmic exuberance of chromatic harlequinades.Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York has half a dozen of these daring, uncategorizable paintings gathered together in one big, square room until May 21. And they are still as wonderfully strange as they were when I first saw some of them, more than 20 years ago. Nothing goes together, at least not in any predictable way. The subjects are minor domestic dramas. But they are treated grandiosely, mythologically, hieratically, almost abstractly. The excitement is in the dissonance, in the tension between Bell’s strongly shaped figures and his flat planes of high-keyed color. In the greatest painting here—Family Group with Butterfly (1986-90)—three figures gathered around a table gesture at a butterfly that’s entered the room. Bell revels in the long horizontal format. He builds a syncopated rhythm out of unfurling lines and colors. The mood is almost impossible to pin down, at once comic and grave, buoyant and solid, obvious and mysterious. Bell trumps the ordinary story. Nothing is what it appears to be. There is a dialectical profundity about Bell’s children’s book simplifications. Family Group with Butterfly is an everyday epic.
Continue reading "Life Lessons From the Ecstatic, Hegelian Work of Painter Leland Bell"
