Art in America, January 1985

Ida Applebroog at Feldman

Ida Applebroog’s work tracks the subterranean pulses of human relationships. She has a gift for those tiny gestures, both physical and verbal, which disclose the concealed dramas of the ordinary. The men and women in her film-still-like frames or sequences are rendered in scant contours of brown or black on white grounds, as if to suggest that they, and by implication all of us, are merely shells inhabited by unarticulated emotions. If Applebroog were a mystery writer, it might be said that she excels at the sort of deceptively innocuous narrative interlude that recapitulates the plot and contains clues to its inevitable denouement.

Dialogue fragments appended to the frames clarify the balance of power between the characters and the way in which gestures are to be read. The shifting weight of a body or the one dissonant intonation in a phrase establishes the scenario’s emotional pitch, which can range from tenderness to violence. In a five-frame sequence in the recent show, a woman on her knees appears to be either entreating or seeking comfort from a man; the intensity of the exchange is immediately apparent, though the scene could be interpreted in different ways. “Tell me,” he says in the first frame, and then in the fourth continues, “Does your condition have a name?”

While Applebroog’s formal debt to cartoons is obvious, her work is never kitschy or cartoony – it has none of the visual hyperbole associated with that genre. Two years ago she showed tiny, three-dimensional figures with text mounted on waist-high pedestals; though touching in sentiment, these sculptures remained miraculously free of cuteness or sentimentality. Their matchbox scale telescoped the world to a single exchange between two characters, much as the repetition of frames does, insisting somehow that everything of importance is to be found in just such small moments.

In seven large oil paintings in the recent show, however, Applebroog introduced into her minimal figurative vision a painterly sensuality which, through elegant and restrained as Applebroog’s work has always been, seems a bit beside the point. Most of the canvases contain the familiar large contour figure on a plain ground, but small inset images are depicted in heavily worked paint. In a number of pieces the inset images inhabit the figures of children like ghosts of future selves; in Willow Point V.A. an officer’s stiff salute mirrors the wide-eyes salute of a Girl Scout, above whom an amputee and a wheel-chair bound invalid hover. The empty expression of a boy blowing bubble-gum in Lovelace Clinic is echoed in the portrait of a smug, cigar-smoking man nestled in the boy’s shoulder; above them one woman licks a male boot that is stepping on her face and another is dragged by the legs. The boy is being prepared to perpetuate the man’s obscenity just as the scout’s mock militarism implies that the seeds of war have been sown for the next generation.

The show also had its lighter moments – Applebroog’s sense of humor is as good as her ability to home in on the threat dormant in even the most intimate human relationships. In Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary a young girl sits with a book on her lap. The image of a bishop painted on the open white page appears to inspire the indelicate images of nuns above the girl’s head.

Riverdale Home for the Aged, Palais Ballroom and Helmsley Palace treat other forms of social incarceration: age, prison, fantasy, poverty and wealth. Riverdale Home juxtaposes an old woman’s heavy, weary back, swollen ankles and ill-fitting shoes with a young man in underwear peering through venetian blinds – images that convey the vulnerability of old age with heartbreaking economy. In Helmsley Palace, a fashionable young woman painted in red tugs at the leash of a fluffy pooch; next to her a ragged, grubby little boy carries an even smaller child on his back. The message is clear – in fact, too clear, no matter how right Applebroog is. In addition, the lush, even slick rendition seems curiously at odds with such sermonizing.

Far more compelling and thought provoking, if of a rawer beauty, were the several series of large charcoal and oil-on-paper drawings. Couple I, Couple II and Couple III explore the nature of relationships and the seesawing of control and intimacy through gesture. In Couple III images appear within the contours of the protagonists like captions displaying heir innermost desire and revealing the discrepancies between appearance and emotion. Triple Triptych flanks sexual images of guns and male violence with those of people laughing; without any of the self-conscious, stylistic grandeur of Leon Golub’s “Mercenaries,” it creates equally disturbing portraits of people who have succumbed to the commingled seductions of psychological and physical warfare. Applebroog’s work is most powerful when, as in Triptych, and indeed in most of her pieces, she achieves her ends by the judicious understatement of both form and content.

JAMEY GAMBRELL