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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Strange" and "rather marvelous" were apt descriptions, also, of
Robert Taplin's roomful of new sculptures at Trans-Hudson Gallery in
the Meat Market District. He also showed a few earlier works, large
surrealizinglsci-fi bronzes of odd beings engaged in not quite compre–
hensible activities, presented with an engaging mixture of skill and
deliberate artlessness. Impressive as the earlier pieces were, I found
Taplin's new works to be subtler and more mysterious. In them, instead
of more or less naturalistic storytelling groups-however oblique the
tale they suggested-we were offered pairs of rather plump, rather ordi–
nary male figures whose drama resided in their materials, their place–
ment, and their apparent lack of style. One of each pair was made of
translucent rice paper, illuminated from within; its mate was opaque.
The pairs were suspended in a darkened space, lit only by the sculptures
themselves-"the five outer planets," Taplin calls them, reminding us
that Saturn devoured his young-so that the opaque images depended
on their faintly glowing counterparts to be seen at all.
The naturalism of the little figures was deceptive; in fact, Taplin rings
changes on both classicism and realism, setting up and defeating expec–
tations, disrupting our most carefully formulated ideas about the ideal
and the particular, about repetition and mirroring, naturalism and
abstraction, and calling up a host of (sometimes contradictory) associa–
tions. For all their apparent modesty, his recent sculptures are fiercely
intelligent and demanding.
The survey of Fairfield Porter's paintings, "A Life in Art," organized
by his biographer, Justin Spring, on view at New York's AXA Gallery
(the former Equitable Gallery), posed similar questions about the roles
of perception and preconception, observation and invention. The show
was a nice mix of familiar and less familiar pictures, bracketed by fas–
cinating documentary material-photographs, letters, and one of Rudy
Burkhardt's more puckish efforts: a parody of a silent film in which
Porter and his wife perform, along with reminders of the painter's tren–
chant art criticism.
Porter is our homegrown, East Coast Vermeer, a connoisseur of the
ephemeral, the domestic, the apparently insignificant. He painted
things you can't imagine anyone wanting to paint-images you'd dis–
card if they turned up in a batch of snapshots: parked cars, screen
doors, nondescript rooms seen from odd angles. He celebrated a Waspy
Arcadia, a place of genteel, slightly down-at-the-heels comfort, of
backyards and porches, where nothing much happens, unless you
count, as he plainly did, the way afternoon light suffuses a living room
in summer. Emotion is expressed with restraint in this low-key earthly
