Art: A darker shade of New Hope

Robert Alexander Darrah Miller, known as R.A.D., died a tragic figure. Three days before Christmas 1966, he stood on his wife's grave in Solebury Friends Burial Grounds near New Hope and shot himself in the heart. Apparently his life had spiraled into despondency after his beloved Celia died in 1953.

Yet Miller's paintings and his attitude toward the artist's life also make him an inspiring figure. Art ("with a capital A," as he once said) was his raison d'etre. Everything else connected with the art world, especially exhibitions and what he disdained as excessive commercialism, was extraneous.

Holding such an attitude, Miller had no right to feel underappreciated, but apparently he did, despite having solo gallery exhibitions in Philadelphia and being included in a 1934 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (he declined to attend the opening).

Even today, he isn't one of the more familiar names associated with the New Hope art colony, perhaps because he wasn't an impressionist.

Miller's paintings, even his landscapes and still lifes, avoid the decorative joie de vivre one associates with that aesthetic. They're more emotionally tense and nuanced, and more unsettling, even though nominally realist.

According to Brian H. Peterson, chief curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum, paintings by Miller are few and far between in public collections. The Michener owns two oils, Lace Factory, painted about 1935, and an undated floral still life.

Using Lace Factory as a nucleus, the museum secured enough private loans to assemble a small but insightful exhibition that conveys the essence of Miller's vision.

As I hope you will see, it's a vision that is superficially conventional but ultimately suggestive of dark subliminal currents. At his best, as in the landscape called New Hope Aqueduct, Miller is capable of elegiac intensity.

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1923 and 1927. Daniel Garber, a prominent Pennsylvania impressionist, was his primary mentor.

However, it's unlikely that any of the 14 paintings in the exhibition will remind you of the optimistic Garber. Every aspect of Miller's style - his palette, use of light, brushwork, and psychological tenor - is the antithesis of Garber's sunny mellowness.

It's not that Miller is gloomy or morbid, it's simply that his paintings range beyond pure sensation and nostalgic description. One has the feeling that reality has been nudged slightly out of register, that while the subjects are familiar, they have been invested with subtle metaphorical shadings.

Small as it is, the exhibition includes examples of the principal genres in which Miller worked - landscape, portraiture, and still life. In all of these, he inflected traditional subject matter with a modernist accent.

In the exhibition catalog, guest curator Cher Krause Knight quotes Miller as insisting that he wasn't a modernist. However, paintings such as Rooftops, New Hope, and The White Silo obviously refute this assertion.

Rooftops is rigorously formalist, with its emphasis on contrasting planes and angles. White Silo is less so, but still devoted to geometric purity. And then there's the strangest (and earliest) picture of all, the moody Entering the City, which seems indebted to symbolist thinking.

Miller combined assertive form, strong color, and light that was simultaneously intense and subdued. That sounds like a contradiction, but when you study a painting like New Hope Aqueduct, Lace Factory, or Hillside Farm With Sunlit Wheat Field the notion makes sense.

His paintings tend to be dark overall, but illuminated selectively by bursts of golden, film-noir-style light that often washes over the facades of buildings. Another New Hope painter, John F. Folinsbee, used a similar strategy, but his brushwork was more animated.

By contrast, Miller's pictures are as still as death, almost otherworldly in the way they suggest a somber reality devoid of any animating presence. And yet these images can be strikingly beautiful - New Hope Aqueduct is a vividly sensuous evocation of the New Hope countryside.

One motif that crops up in several paintings is especially disquieting - barren trees, often placed prominently in the foreground. One tends to read them as being dead rather than as evidence of autumn giving way to winter.

And yet Miller also composed vigorous affirmations of life, meticulous studies of potted cyclamens and Oriental poppies. These seem to reflect the emotional conflicts that led to his death - joy in art, sailing, and horticulture attenuated and eventually overcome by the pain of losing his wife.

Miller was, as the show title proclaims, an independent spirit, yet despite an extensive catalog essay by Knight he remains somewhat elusive as an artist and a person. This sampler of his work makes one want to know a lot more about him.

"From Raw to Refined" at the Reading Public Museum isn't an exhibition that sets the pulse racing but a conventional presentation of art and crafted objects in traditional media. Yet in an oblique way, it illuminates several aesthetic ideas worth noting and remembering. And it contains one unconventional and delightful surprise.

The participants are all members of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen. We expect, then, that the show will be a selection of furniture, ceramics, jewelry, and textiles made in basement workshops and backyard studios.

To a large extent it is that. Yet I was surprised to discover that the guild also includes drawing, photography, painting, and sculpture in its jurisdiction. So even to this skill-oriented organization the distinction between art and craft no longer means much. Nor should it.

Generally speaking, the crafted works among the 90 in the show are more to be admired than the two-dimensional pieces.

Some exhibits are superbly crafted examples of historical forms - Robert Zink's nesting Nantucket baskets and Lawrence Crossan's Queen Anne highboy in cherrywood being two that stand out in this regard.

The eclectic mix of materials and aesthetics confirms that arbitrary distinctions between art and craft are not only specious but irrelevant.

This is especially true for ceramics, as a bottle with a mottled surface by Timothy Knight, a vessel of bronze-colored stoneware leaf forms by Connie Bracci-McIndoe, and a pit-fired pot by Greg Kele Cieniewicz-Hardy indicate.

That's one object lesson. The other is the important contribution of age to aesthetic refinement, seen most readily in the furniture. The patina of Crossan's highboy, for instance, is still a bit raw and thin. It will take a century or two of oiling, waxing, and oxidation to nurture its ultimate glory.

The show-stopping surprise is a massive timber-frame clock by Rick and Vince Stanley that might have been made for a church belfry. It's about 10 feet tall, has five chimes, and is driven by huge slabs of jagged rock as counterweights.

The mechanism is fully exposed, so you can show your children how it works. And despite its gargantuan proportions it keeps good time. You could set your watch by it.

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