Art in America, February 1983

Ida Applebroog at Ronald Feldman

When Ida Applebroog started to redefine herself as an artist in the early ‘70s she had a lot to unlearn. Composition, color, “expressive” drawing were all jettisoned because they were in the way of the serviceable, minimal representation that she needed to depict her take on the human condition. In the mid-‘70s Applebroog made her first books. She still makes them. Each has 12 pages (like the dirty books that circulated in school in the ‘30x and ‘40s). Each page repeats the same simple line drawing of an enigmatic human situation; one page in the series has the caption. She expanded the scale and variety of these spare, witty tableaux for her first show at Feldman’s (spring 1980) and again for this exhibition.

At the first show I missed the intimacy of the books and felt that the large gallery spaces overpowered the work. This time the work felt more confident – for in addition to the small, cut-out vellum stagings there were larger drawings on raw canvas sealed by Rhoplex and a series of tiny spare environments, each with a female figure and a park bench, set on high white pedestals.

A sense of irony pervades all of this work. Its people relate to one another with simple, almost archetypal gestures. Captions, where they are used, don’t always illuminate the event but instead set up a psychic reverberation around the work. A good example of this is the piece Thank You Very Much. There are seven panels, each about ten inches square. Each panel presents an almost identical view of five women, nude (except for panties) and seen from the rear. They re part of some event – a chorus line or a beauty contest. Beneath the fifth panel is the caption “Mr. Schlusser is dead” and beneath the seventh and last panel is “Thank you very much.” I worked out a partial scenario. It included my memories of Diane Arbus’s nudist colony photographs, her suicide, the Dietrich movie The Blue Angel and the classic Jewish joke in which the stage manager announces that the star has died: “Give him chicken soup,” a spectator suggests. But I said he was dead,” the manager replies. “It couldn’t hurt,” says the spectator. The captions and the images have just the right degree of the inexplicable and encourage interpretation. When I questioned the artist about Thank You Very Much, she told me that Mr. S. was a family friend with an unhappy life. She fantasized that he had secret pleasures like going to burlesque shows and that when he died the women could thank him for his loyal patronage. Who could know all of this? It is her secret agenda, the stories that only Applebroog knows. Yet there is a hint of a deeper common humanity here that allows us all to write our own scripts for these stills from Applebroog’s ongoing movie.

PAUL BRACH