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In Quiet Chorus: Mary Frank’s ¿Or Was It Like This? and Charles Burchfield’s Solitude
at D.C. Moore Gallery, NYC (through February 8)
Reviewed by John Haber
Mary Frank is not just a visionary. Neither was Charles Burchfield, back when Modernism was just bringing art back to earth. Yet showing them together brings alive their most unearthly twentieth-century visions. Frank has always had an eye on planet earth. She studied with Max Beckmann, the artist who refused to look away from Germany in the 1930s, even after Beckmann’s exile in America. And then she studied life drawing in New York with Hans Hoffman, the teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. She has stood out among artists less than half her age in a 2009 group show of Natural Histories. She returns now to painting after a decade of photography with an eye to nature — her surroundings at home in the Catskills. That return, though, marks even her most naturalistic subjects as not altogether of this world.
It hardly hurts to see her, from the 1980s right up to the present, beside work by Burchfield from the mid-twenties. They may seem an unlikely pair — the Midwesterner and the Englishwoman, the aspiring…
