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JUNE WAYNE: A Retrospective
By PETER FRANK
LA Weekly - January 15-21, 1999 |
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| It's about bloody time,
her friends, colleagues and admirers say. Those whose
familiarity with June Wayne is less keen will respond
with questions, however rhetorical: She does other things
besides prints? She's not only an abstractionist. She's
participated in the WPA? Doyenne (with apologies to Helen
Lundeberg) of Los Angeles art, founder of the West Coast's
oldest print studio (the Tamarind Lithography Workshop),
feminist artist avant le fait and constant fighter for
social justice (not least for artists), Wayne had been
lauded for everything but her own artwork-which, this
retrospective shows, is plenty worthy of acclaim. And
not just for the lithographs. The survey goes back just
about to World War II (although her career went back another
decade), beginning with some fascinating, luminous late-Surrealist
paintings populated by figures, part fauna, part flora,
floating or aligning in ambiguous spaces. Wayne gets more
abstract after that, exploring in particular the textural
and chromatic possibilities of lithography (and, from
the '50's onward, occasionally and very successfully translating
her graphic intricacy to tapestry). You might consider
it a more circumspect for of Abstract Expressionism; certainly,
Wayne seems keyed in to the movements of the time, whether
it's assemblage and Pop are in the early '60's, Op art
and color-field (not to mention Light & Space) a few
years later, autobiographical narrative in the Me Decade,
Neo-expressionism in the '80's, or whatever else comes
along. But she is no mindless trend-sucker; with each
turn in her approach, rather than simply imitating gimmicks,
Wayne absorbs and reinterprets-and in a number of cases
even anticipates-lessons in technique and manner from
the dominant (and often sub-dominant) tendency. Indeed,
in most cases her work remains hard to categorize-those
surrealist canvases one exception, and another the late-
70's cycle of lithographs with which Wayne tells the story
of her own mother. "The Dorothy Series," revealing
(with personal documents reproduced in shimmering, almost
psychedelic colors) the life of a single Jewish mom who
made her living as a traveling saleswoman, is artistic
feminism at it's toughest, most poignant and most opulent.
The paintings Wayne has been doing in the past decade
or so, forceful, mesmerizing patterns rendered with acrylic
on styrene affixed to panel, continue her preoccupation
with texture and luster-and continue her demonstration
that in such supposedly superficial elements reside great
mysteries and delights. At the Los Angeles Museum of Art;
thru Feb 15, 1999. |
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