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Photo Sue Harrison
Selina Trieff with her charcoal drawing “Standing with Pigs” at her opening last Friday at Berta Walker Gallery. This Friday she opens at PAAM. |
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“Three Figures with Green Goat,” oil on canvas, 1974 by Selina Trieff. |
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Trieff reflects on the human condition
By Susan Rand Brown
Banner Correspondent
Now in her seventh decade and 50 years after studies with 20th century abstract expressionists Hans Hofmann, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, the revered painter Selina Trieff rarely shows signs of slowing down. She draws and paints every day and is having two back-to-back shows in Provincetown, including a major 30-year retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Trieff’s expressive art is being exhibited collaboratively in both Provincetown locations, drawings and paintings from intimate to monumental at the Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford St., and paintings spanning several decades at PAAM, 460 Commercial St. “Selina Trieff: Master of the Look, a 30-Year Overview,” opens at PAAM this Friday, July 27, 8 to 10 p.m., and is on view until Sept. 2. The Walker Gallery show, which opened last Friday and includes Robert Henry’s triptych paintings, Elspeth Halvorsen’s constructions and Sky Powers’ large abstract paintings, is on display through Aug. 5.
On the summer morning of her talk with the Banner, she has the door of her Wellfleet home and studio wide open, something she and painter-husband Robert Henry often do as an invitation to passersby to step inside.
Three tourists walk through single-file. From her studio nearby, Trieff looks up. “Come on in and look around,” she says encouragingly. A young woman, leg in a cast, enters last. “Oh, what happened to you?” Trieff murmurs. When she leaves, Trieff calls after her: “Be well soon.”
This outpouring of spontaneous empathy, for strangers who happen to walk through her door, is pure Trieff. With just the slightest inclination of the body or gesture of the hand, the theatrical figures with the black doe eyes facing out from Trieff’s six-foot canvases convey this exactly: welcome to my world. Stay awhile. Reflect on the human condition. Be well soon.
In between welcoming visitors and some house painters within earshot, Trieff talks about her singular art, populated by a repertory of symbolic characters: the sad jester, the shrouded wise elder, the cardinal, the pilgrim, the mother, the dancer. There are also brightly painted skeletons, hovering near to bring comfort to others. Then there are the domestic animals, referred to by others as Trieff’s “farm”: wise goats, pigs, sheep, birds and her dog, Louie. Trieff’s signature rooster, funny, curious and bold, could be a stand-in for this Brooklyn-born artist who never followed the crowd.
She is often asked to explain the sources of her theatrical, costumed figures with their chalk-white faces and haunting eyes, touching or leaning into each other as if sharing secret knowledge. Coming from a painter associated with the New York school of abstract expressionists, her answer is a surprise: “If you think about early Renaissance art,” she says, “[many] paintings are about the embrace, where Jesus’s mother and John the Baptist’s mother are greeting each other, the hugging and kissing they do.”
In their gestures and faces, Trieff’s figures also resemble her own family. “It’s not done deliberately,” she says, “but is just one of those things that happen. They may be modeled after my kids, or another family member. If I gave you a pencil and said draw somebody, a lot of it would look like you.” They could also be faces of the artist: speaking about the pensive jester, the shrouded elder and the mother in “Triad” (in the PAAM show), she says, “They are all of one being.”
But while her figures may resemble real people, she is not a realist. Like the pre-Renaissance religious art she connects to, figures in Trieff’s paintings exist in a flat, unrealistic space, suspended beyond mortal time. While not totally abstract like a Rothko, Trieff’s work, with its splashes of gold leaf connecting or beatifying figures, shares his luminous spirituality. “My art has always been unfashionable,” she states matter-of-factly.
Trieff’s local connections run deep. By the time she and husband Robert Henry met as students in Ad Reinhardt’s class at Brooklyn College, he had already been a Hofmann student, in New York and Provincetown. She studied with Hofmann in 1954 and ’55. Both Trieff and Henry were involved with the Sun Gallery, showing alongside Tony Vevers, Red Grooms and Jan Muller.
Trieff’s relationship with Berta Walker goes back to the mid-1980s, when Walker was founding director of Manhattan’s Graham Modern, a Madison Avenue gallery. Trieff sent Walker slides of her work (they had yet to meet); Walker came for a studio visit, leading to several sold-out shows. When Walker opened her own Provincetown gallery, Trieff began showing there regularly.
As she was inspired by her teachers, Trieff’s legacy will include what she herself passes down. Her class at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, “Seeing the Abstraction in Representation and the Representation in Abstraction,” gets students drawing from a model, as Hofmann students were trained to do, no matter how abstract the end result. During the 1950s, Trieff recalls, she, along with Wolf Kahn, Robert Beauchamp, Marisol, Mary Frank and Taro Yamamoto, participated in Hofmann’s drop-by figure drawing classes New York. She continues to draw every day.
The Work Center class stays with a figure drawing until it yields its geometric essence, aiming for that push-pull on the picture plane Hofmann famously described. Trieff circles the room. Someone raises a question about the feet. “Make them a little larger. That was Hofmann’s first rule. Things that are near make bigger; [then] if you make the head smaller, the figure becomes more monumental.”
Trieff’s own compositions reflect this insight. In “The Three of Us,” a portrait done in 1974 of the artist reaching out to daughters Sarah and Jane (in the PAAM show), Jane’s feet, planted in the foreground, are elongated while her head is slightly smaller, creating an illusion of monumentality. As Trieff’s style grows increasingly pure and abstract, her diaphanous women, often in groups of two or three, continue to face outward in familial embrace.
Trieff’s generosity to non-profit arts organizations is well-known. She speaks of her grandmother, who on her deathbed counseled the family to “do good in this world.” Many devoted collectors begin by admiring (and bidding on) her work at fund-raising art auctions.
This winter, she and Henry will stay in Wellfleet rather than return to their loft and studios in Lower Manhattan. “We have more social life here: most of our friends will not walk up the six floors to our New York place, so we meet them at a Chinese restaurant around the corner. Here, we’ll be able to be more sociable, get out more,” she says.
Above all, Selina Trieff will continue to pull from a seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of images, opening a door to the landscape of our collective unconscious. Her assessment is more modest: “Knowing me, I’ll be doing just what I’ve been doing all summer, working downstairs in my studio. If I wasn’t painting, I’d be impossible.”
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Jul 26th, 2007