The New York Times, October 26, 1984

IDA APPLEBROOG

Ida Applebroog (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer Street): The small, cartoony panel strips in which Ida Applebroog has- for some time now- been scoring off humanity’s clichés, are upstaged here by a group of large paintings and multi-panel drawings. Some of the drawings, in color and black and white, with captions, are wonderful; in them Applebroog breaks out of her rigid “cartoon” formula, and line flows gaily. One 11-panel work starts out with a vertical drawing of a man lifting up a woman; then the drawing is sliced to lose its bottom half and turned on its side so that for the next nine panels their posture is one of love-making. Nothing clinical, mind you, but very wittily observed.

The paintings, which deal with the theme of “inmates”- in hospitals, old folks’ homes, and so forth- are more problematical. In these the canvas is generally divided into two unequal parts, the larger bearing the main image, the smaller, what’s presumably a comment on it. In “Riverdale Home for the Aged,” for instance, we get- on a densely painted black ground- a back view of an old woman in a worn, shapeless coat, equipped with purse and shopping bag. She’s colored a shrieking pink. By contrast, on the narrow strip of canvas alongside of this image, a beautiful, languid youth in bikini shorts looks dreamily out a window. Or, in “Willow Point V.A.,” a blown-up cartoon drawing in black and white of a Boy Scout saluting has, in the sleeve of the scout’s uniform, an echoing salute, this time rendered by a grim-looking military man. A narrow frieze at the top of the canvas contains fragmentary scenes of grief and disablement, presumably pointing up what military salutes can lead to. Not to carp at the artist’s concepts, as paintings, they simply don’t seem substantial enough to justify their scale.

Applebroog the less pretentious needler has more appeal. One of her small, old-style cartoon panel strips here shows a man seated by the bedside of a prostrate woman. Watching her closely for several silent panels, he finally sys, “Your eggs are getting cold.” (Through Nov. 24.)

GRACE GLUECK,