Three kinds of impressionism at Michener Museum

A centerpiece of the Michener Art Museum's current show, "The Death of Impressionism? Disruption & Innovation in Art," is a recent series of paintings by Illia Barger entitled The Dead Impressionists.

Each of the five paintings depicts a member of the group of artists identified early in the 20th century as Bucks County impressionists. Each holds a painting. The figures themselves are monochromatic, lurking in sepia shadow, but their paintings are bright and vibrant.

The obvious message of this series is that while the impressionists themselves are dead, they left behind works that are still lively, engaging, and even inspiring. Another thing you notice is that the works reproduced in the paintings owe as much to American traditions of landscape painting as to Monet  Degas, or Renoir.

Barger, the daughter of local artists, is commemorating some of her artistic forebears, switching from one style to another in her imitation of their work. For her, the artists — their faces and their clothes as well as their work — are material for new art.

Barger provides a moment of near-clarity in an exhibition that goes off in countless directions, some of them interesting, while never quite making a point. Barger's impressionists are unquestionably dead. The Michener curators use a question mark in their title, as a sort of coy signal that impressionism might not be dead, and in fact that could be alive, well, and living in Doylestown.

Actually, the show deals with three kinds of impressionism. First, of course, is French impressionism, a 19th-century phenomenon focused on the changing effects of light through the use of discontinuous brushstrokes and unexpected color. That was long since over when the second impressionism, the local one centered in New Hope and sometimes called Pennsylvania Impressionism, reached its peak around 1915. Some of these painters were inspired by the earlier impressionists, and some who came after, such as Cézanne and Van Gogh, but they were also inspired by the local landscape and by artists who had nothing to do with the original impressionists.

The third impressionism is not so much an art movement as it is a brand. An impressionist show carries the promise of a pleasant day at the museum, filled with colorful paintings of pleasant people at leisure. Such exhibitions tend to be extremely popular. Indeed, the introductory text of this exhibition cites long lines at museums for impressionism shows as an argument for its contemporary relevance.

The Michener is best equipped to deal with the second, regional impressionism, which is, in fact, the core of its collection. Yet perhaps the most useful thing the show does is to show that, for many artists, impressionism is just a stage they went through.

For example, River in Winter (1918) by Charles Rosen has all you might expect from a work of Bucks County impressionism: an icy Delaware River filled with pastel reflections and flanked by furiously crosshatched hills.

On the same wall is Under the Bridge, which Rosen painted the same year. Its influence comes not from Paris and impressionism, but from Philadelphia and New York, where the artists who became known as the Ashcan School painted lively scenes of urban squalor.

Charles Frederic Ramsey shows an even more dramatic evolution, from the wispy Autumn Afternoon (1911) to the streamlined Art Deco Modern Woman (1934) and Ninety Degrees (1950), a rectilinear riff on Piet Mondrian. John Folinsbee, who has the most works in the show, seems to have been only intermittently impressionist.

Impressionism was clearly just one influence among many on the eclectic lot of regional artists who came to be known as impressionists. Most of the exhibition, however, consists of more recent works by artists whose technique or subject matter might be seen to be influenced by impressionism. That is a big enough category to include just about anyone, and the result is an incoherent mixed bag.

of Rouen Cathedral in different lighting conditions. Muniz used dry pigments, scattered on a surface. The granularity and roughness of the surface, as shown in the photographs, is different from Monet. But it reminds us of something important about impressionism: It was all about light, but made from minerals.

Most of Robert Engman's sculpture is made from metal, but it seems an exploration of a wholly mental and mathematical space, removed from the physical world in which we live. Thus it is surprising to discover in "Shifting the Limits: Robert Engman's Structural Sculpture," on view at the Michener through Feb. 7, that his forms grow from physical experimentation, not intellectual labor.
The breakthrough work he calls his First Piece (1956) was formed from two sheets of brass, beaten into a curved shape, then attached. It set the pattern for most of what he has done since.

Engman, who was born in 1927, taught sculpture for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for some very large sculptures in public places, including Triune (1975), opposite the southwest corner of City Hall, and After B. K. S. Iyengar, (1978) an evocation of a yoga master at the Morris Arboretum.

These are only a few inches tall, but there is no sense that they are diminished. Indeed, Engman's work is most compelling the nearer it gets to jewelry. In fact, there is some jewelry in the show, including a version of Triune that is more satisfying than the big bronze.

If you are engaged in abstract formal exploration as Engman is, scale doesn't seem to matter. He is happy to present the same form at two inches as at 30 feet. My takeaway from this excellent exhibition, though, is that Engman's work is best when small.

tom@thomashine.com