The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world.
Anne Harvey and Raymond Mason at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects
2022.12.10
Thank you, Steven Harvey,
for your current exhibition, Anne Harvey and Raymond Mason: in Pars,
resurrecting two important expatriate early Modernist artists wo lived
most of their adult lives in Paris. Anne Harvey, who was a painter and
(interestingly) the aunt of Steven Harvey, came from an American family
already centered in the advanced modernist art world, with deep
connections to Brancusi, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood
Anderson. Harvey’s good friend, Raymond
Mason, was a British sculptor fairly well-known at the time. Though
both artists had singular voices worthy of this renewed look, I found
Anne’s quirky observational paintings the more compelling of the two
bodies of work currently on view. Anne’s paintings and drawings
lovingly create the fluidly of multiple viewpoints and odd
phenomenological shifts of scale, space and points of focus we all
experience, in many ways more convincingly than did Picasso in his
somewhat conceptualized (though marvelous) Cubist paintings and
constructions. A chair’s seat is seen from above, its backrest from
straight-on, and its legs squeezed into a tiny space below, while a
nearby gramophone’s huge speaker lurches out at us as if blasting its
music, and a loveseat with a huge cat physically far behind these
objects is brought up to the same spatial level because Anne is
interested in this cat. On
top of these spatial twists, Harvey’s exquisite line and attention to pattern
and detail fitting perfectly within the whole, give her work a personal and
intriguing sense of observational design. Mason’s sculptural reliefs have a solidity and
mass, with unusual scale shifts and cropping that create his unique and
eerie sense of narrative, in contrast to the straight-forward British
rendition of city street life typical at the time. The exhibition of
paintings by Anne Harvey, sculpture by Raymond Mason, and drawings by
both artists remains on view at SHFAP Gallery through today, Dec. 10.
The accompanying catalogue, Anne Harvey in Paris, contains intriguing
articles by Henry Lessore and Sidney Geist. Anne’s tragic life might be
the spark for a Hollywood film.
Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey, painting of Brancusi
Anne Harvey, study for Brancusi painting
Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey
Anne Harvey
Raymond Mason
Raymond Mason
Raymond Mason
Raymond Mason
Raymond Mason