75th-anniversary exhibit celebrates American Abstract Artists

This is the 75th anniversary of American Abstract Artists, an organization of artists who banded together to create a forum for the discussion, exhibition, and promotion of their art.

One of the few artists' groups launched in the Great Depression, it had clout from the start, and its effort to build better understanding continues today.

"Abstraction to the Power of Infinity" is its exhibition at the Icebox in the Crane Building, featuring 80 living artists, all New Yorkers except for four invited Philadelphians. The event is curated by Janet Kurnatowski, who directs a Brooklyn art gallery. New York's O.K. Harris Gallery held a recent AAA anniversary show of similar size, with most of the same artists, but different works.

This display in Lower Kensington also pays tribute to AAA's first centenarian, painter Will Barnet, a member since 1956. Much appreciated locally as a former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Barnet here offers a vibrant canvas, Joyous, which he painted in 2006.

In this show, strong colors and vigorous strokes activate spatial tensions and create many energetic compositions. And while some of the other abstractions seem familiar and conventional, the best ones show that skill and artistic ambition can be a combustible mixture. Hybrid species of painting and relief sculpture are few, as are other sculptures.

Outstanding are Creighton Michael's dramatic photo triptych and Mon Levinson's white-on-white rotund piece. Also worthy of note are pieces by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Steven Alexander, Martin Ball, Gabriele Evertz, Vito Giacalone, John Goodyear, Gilbert Hsiao, Phillis Ideal, Roger Jorgensen, James Juszczyk, Victor Kord, Ce Roser, Irene Rousseau, Richard Timperio, Vera Vasek, Dan Voisine and Stephen Westfall.

The AAA does not play down artists' honest struggle and achievement, reducing them to a question of who is "in" and who's "out," so it is pointless to stick an easy label on these artists. They share qualities of a spirit of experimentation that values questions more than answers, willingness to risk unusual means, courage in getting "messages" across, and also a strong sense of values. And they must keep growing to brush aside conformity and reach toward audacity. A very rewarding show.

Martha Armstrong, a visiting critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, shows her latest somewhat abstract rural landscape oils at McCleaf. These have a simplicity and power, their intensity of focus on feeling and seasonal changes being major elements in the tale she tells of her Vermont studio's natural surroundings that include ambitious exercises in reconciling geometry and gesture, adequately realized.

Also at McCleaf, Louise E. Hamlin, a studio art professor at Dartmouth College, is introduced and shows pastel paintings with strange incrustations that, in going for an extra vitality, give up on refinement. She relies instead on outdoor close-ups of thick, rugged terrain, often with rushing water. These views, most notably her striking Autumn, Mascoma, rank grossly, handsomely among nature's overstatements in various seasons by a well-known New England artist who decades ago received her B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gideon Chase, a psychiatrist's son and illustrator from San Francisco who lives in Philadelphia, demonstrates a near-fatal attachment to jokes in his show "Muscle Beach" at Rodger LaPelle Galleries. You wouldn't call it high moral outrage. There's nothing to fill out the meaning of the images and the context from which they come. At times there is something grotesquely comical, as in his

Repurposed Guillotine

image. So, is his enterprising artwork an alarming testament to our "comfortable" times?

Also at LaPelle, Romi Sloboda's show "Waiting for Rain" featuring collagraph print/collages captures the beauty remembered since childhood of her Korean mother's collection of many Korean cups with their ingenuous symmetry and abstract clarity. Sloboda's portrayals always imply either more or less than the blue, Venetian red or bronzy skin of those cherished ceramic pieces.

William Kosman's show "Crown Heights, Brooklyn" at Society Hill Synagogue offers a moving evocation of a neighborhood way of life, ranging from street scenes to Orthodox Jewish men at prayer. Like a primitive artist, Kosman seeks to infuse a sense of personal intimacy into everything he does.