232
PARTISAN REVIEW
best of the ecological pictures criticize the feminist pictures, since the
ecological works operate on a variety of levels , make their point slowly,
and reward attention.
One of the oddest of last season's offerings was the Leonid Lerman
show at David McKee Gallery. The Soviet-born Lerman paints parodic
images that question the meaning of modernism, forcing late Malevich
figures, those awful streamlined peasants that were Malcvich's response to
political pressure, into modernist icons - Van Gogh fields, Monet gardens
- or traditional ones - Vermeer interiors. He plays similar games by alter–
ing beach scenes by William Merrit Chase or dividing a Monet landscape
into Malevich squares. No one is safe, from Grant Wood on. I would
dismiss Lerman's conceits at best as witty one-liners, except for having
been stopped dead by his transformation of George Caleb Bingham's
marvelous
Fllr Traders
Des(el1dil1,~
the Missollri.
There, the contrast between
the luminous, utterly still scene and Malcvich's ominous black square,
"held" by the rear paddler, produced a genuine air of mystery. The re–
flection of the trappers and the animal in the canoe persists, and the al–
tered image becomes poetic, uncanny, reverberant. I was surprised by
how convincing I found this picture, but as some of us have always said,
art is a matter of experience.
20th CENTURY
AMERICAN ART
KRAUSHAARGALLERIES
724 FIFTH AVENUE . NEW YORK 10019 • (212) 307-5730
