Arts, April 1986
IDA APPLEBROOG
Since the mid-‘70’s, Ida Applebroog’s signature image has been a simply drawn window, seen from the outside, with its shade half-pulled. Figures appear in the window singly, in pairs, or in small groups; like their setting they are essentially featureless, barely more than outlines. Often they are shown just sitting or standing, sometimes engaged in mundane domestic activity, and every so often involved in an implied narrative context that is sexually or even criminally suggestive. In fact, a vague subtext of paranoia and voyeurism often colors these scenes, but a subtext it has remained. The deliberate nowheres-ville triviality of Applebroog’s images and her slick mock-amateur draftsmanship have constituted a “naïve” art of distinctly postmodern cast, based on a muted, pointed irony of no-drama.
Applebroog’s recent show consists of work which takes a very different approach. She titles the show Cul-De-Sacs, and that alone indicates that we are being given work far more bluntly expressionistic in spirit than we might logically have expected from her. The predominant format is oil on canvas painting (rather than the rhoplex on vellum she has frequently used in the past); the prevailing content, graphic images of emotional and physical perturbation. The intrusions and violations that were usually only implied in the “window pieces” of some years backs are acted out in front of us here.
Even where Applebroog still uses the window motif, she is doing very different things with it, turning it, in Sunflower Drive, for instance, into a horizontal triptych which includes not only her familiar cartoony figures but also the immense and expressionistically painted face of an old woman screaming. All the implicit political didactism and black humor in her work is made explicit, too. The women in her earlier window pieces, for example, often seemed menaced but Applebroog kept the threat cool, teasing, even faintly ridiculous because never consummated. Here, in her series of four paintings all identically titled Two Women and brushed in sweeping impulsive strokes, the assualtive physical force is so overt you almost mistake it for a brash vaudevillian joke.
Even Applebroog’s intimism here recalls only the scale of her earlier work, not its studied, subtle tone. Promise I Won’t Die resembles her comic-strip panel format only in being a single large piece made up of several discrete components (watercolors and gouaches on paper). But with its images of death (from Auschwitz victims to a suicide in progress) floating across the wall like notebook pages ripped loose from their binding and scattered, this work offers us a stirring formal and conceptual impatience- and poetry- of a kind we haven’t had from this fine artist before.
HOLLAND COTTER
