ARTnews , April 2002

Ida Applebroog

For the past four years, Ida Applebroog has been working on a series of “Modern Olympias,” witty, spirited riffs on the canvas by Edouard Manet that stunned the Salon-going public in 1863. There’s little to scandalize here – and these cartoonlike drawings and paintings have little to do with Manet – but the works do mark a departure from Applebroog’s favored themes of guilt, domestic violence, emotional dysfunction, and other hazards of modern life. If possible, Applebroog seems to be in a lighthearted mood, seeing just how far she can stretch the boundaries of the classic nude through the manipulation of scale and medium.

The seven nudes on four panels in Modern Olympia (After Manet) half-recline in a semicircle, toes pointing toward a small cross, against a scumbled gray background. Like all of the artist’s figures, they are blankfaced and remote; a couple of ghostly underdrawings of childlike figures holding a drum and pulling a small horse tease at some deeper meaning – or perhaps the artist just changed her mind. Modern Olympia (After O’Keeffe), a multipart wall of watercolors on paper, might have been titled “After Rodin,” since the assorted g graphic poses, some of lesbian pairs, recall the great sculptor’s freewheeling drawings of naked models cavorting around his studio.

Applebroog transports Olympia into the realm of fashion with the series “After Versace.” These awkwardly naked, anorexic females (one more that eight feet gall) look appallingly uncomfortable when stripped of the glamour f fashion affords. In a three-part work, After Cezanne, Applebroog shows an elderly woman in an adult diaper and socks, a zaftig creature swimming down the canvas, and another wearing a spiked collar. Again, this seems to have little to do with the 19th century masters, but it does set one to thinking about the constraints of conventional beauty.

ANN LANDI