New York Magazine, December 2, 1991

The searing terrain of intuition is nowhere better defended this month than by a 62-year-old woman, Ida Applebroog. Of the wrong generation to be a post-minimalist, Applebroog is an acute observer of small lies, social and sexual hypocrisies, nightmarish intimacies, and the surreal edge of normality. I would guess that this is a territory women know particularly well. There is an intense feminist perception buried in this work, yet Applebroog has not sacrificed the muddle of contrariness of real life for the one-note ideological clarity of women half her age. Shock tactics have their place, but Applebroog professes more of an interest in the world of Goya, where the undermind flourishes.

Applebroog hit stride in the seventies with small scenarios centered on a single repeated telling gesture. Some of these are now attached to much larger paintings: A plump man throws open his arms; he swings a broom. He might be working in the kitchen, or invoking Heaven and hell. So resonant are these tiny scenes - such as the one where a man holds the open edges of a woman’s blouse - that each seems to pack in a whole Freudian textbook. It was hard to see where Applebroog would go, but she simply stretched.

The big paintings - sometimes set out on the floor, as though they were characters in a wax museum - are scenic composites in which small stories merge into larger ones. The figures are subjected to subtle humiliations, as when a monkey is forced to wear a Santa Claus beard, or when (citing Manet) a woman takes off her clothes in a boat with two fully clothed men. The vulnerability is sometimes dramatic, sometimes just the normal kind that flesh is heir to. It is always surrounded by a matter-of-fact indifference that resembles the true horror of ordinary reality.

Leon Golub has made a major reputation out of scenes of distant mayhem - political torture, and so on. Applebroog, to my mind, is an equally strong painter, and deserves to be ranked as high as he is, but because she addresses the mayhem at home, she has been at a disadvantage. Like Golub, she draws a parallel between the eroded transparency of the paint surface and the mental erosions of her figures. But brutalities close at hand are still considered less “topical” than those in faraway countries. Golub hasn’t actually participated in the horrors he records. Applebroog is a painfully astute witness to the psychological slippage within the everyday. If intuition were given proper credit in this analytical age, her place would be secure.

-KAY LARSON,