Gail Chadell Nanao

paintings by Gail Chadell Nanao, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (my photos)

Eastside Road, May 26, 2018—

Her View: The Bay Area Figuration of Gail Chadell Nanao at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, 551 Broadway, Sonoma, California Wed-Sun 11-5, closing June 10, 2018

I MET GAIL CHADELL NANAO in 2006, I think, when we were invited to the Nanao home in Berkeley for dinner. Her husband the painter Kenjilo cooked beefsteak on a hot griddle at the table; it was delicious. Five years later we met again when I visited Kenji’s studio in Oakland to discuss writing an essay for his forthcoming retrospective at the Triton Gallery in Santa Clara. A bittersweet occasion: Kenji was in his last year.

After Kenji’s death we tried to maintain acquaintance with Gail, but you know how it is: we live sixty miles away; our life is full and so is hers. (Negotiating the dispersal of Kenji’s studio must have taken all her energies: I’m always struck by the enormity of the tasks faced by painters’ survivors.)

And for some reason, admirable as her work is, it is not represented in Bay Area galleries. We had driven over to Sacramento in 2012 to see her paintings and ceramics at the B. Sagata Garo Gallery — a memorable show, I thought. But since then, nothing, until the other day, when we were in the town of Sonoma to see her first retrospective.

I suppose Gail’s resumé is that of many women of her generation. She came early to her art, studying paintings in the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; she attended the university in Buffalo where she was knocked out by an exhibition of Clyfford Still at the Albright-Knox; she continued at the ssfo Art Institute where she was moved by the community that grew up around the two poles then current, Bay Area Abstract Expressionism and Figurative, as practiced by Lobdell, Jefferson, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, and Oliveira, and Neri, Joan Brown, and Jay De Feo.

At the SFAI however she also met and soon married Kenji. Soon, in the early 1970s, they had a child. Before long she was working, full time, as a social worker. She stopped painting until 1996, when she and Kenji were awarded a stay in Norway at Ekely, Edvard Munch’s home and studio. The Norwegian master’s emotional power seems to have reawakened her own, and she resumed painting.

The career curve is worth considering: it began with the influences of Symbolists like Beckmann and Munch (though already in her childhood she was fascinated by Modigliani), caught fire through the abstract ecstasy of Still, ripened in ssfo through the influence of Oliveira and Lobdell, then slept for twenty years, then was reawakened by immersion in the work and place of Munch.

Through it all, of course, she was living with the presence of Kenji and his work — painting and printmaking which on its face seems to have little to do with the figurative emotional depth of Gail’s influences, though behind the serene surfaces of his work I would argue there’s considerable human experience. (I’ve written about Kenji’s work here and here.)

Now, in this new age of awareness of the place of woman in the human condition, Gail Chadell Nanao provokes a renewed consideration of a female sensibility. That’s at the base, I think, of Susan Landauer’s essay in the catalog accompanying the exhibition she’s installed in the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in which she argues for a uniquely female eye guiding Gail Nanao’s work, the emotions in her work, and her approach to the nude (especially the female nude).

Of All Things Lovely, 60x50 in.; 2016

Laudauer may be right. I’m not sure I agree with the idea that the painter’s eye is necessarily gendered; I think much gendering is done by onlookers. I’m more interested in how this work acknowledges its source community while maintaining its own identity. Nathan Oliveira, the early Joan Brown, and other familiar Bay Area masters clearly look on among the paintings in the Sonoma Valley Museum gallery, but Gail Nanao’s work holds its own. Her canvases are strong and beautiful and Susan Landauer is right to observe that the work expresses a uniquely individual viewpoint.

I admire the great San Francisco Bay Area work of its time for an unusual quality: strength, even power, that is somehow devoid of ego-expression. This separates it from, lifts it above the work of, for example, Clyfford Still. (Picasso is another matter, and worth contemplating.) What reassures me in Gail Nanao’s work, which goes on — the most recent painting here is from 2016 — is its evidence that this quality is not merely of that time of fifty years ago; it is a living quality, probably more valuable and needed than ever. It’s a quality undoubtedly born of the tragedy of the mid-twentieth century in the wake of World War II (and such later ones as the Kennedy assassination, which influenced one of Nanao’s early paintings, Birthday Party), but is transformed, in these paintings, from witness to previous tragedy to oracle of the near future.

And through it all, beauty; the beauty of acknowledgement and patience and expression and realism.

And lyricism. There are two or three watercolors on view, energetic but tender and affecting. And a number of painted ceramic pieces — vases, plates, bowls, and trays — that might easily be overlooked. Don't miss them.

Two books: The Elegance of the Hedgehog ; Mother Tongue

Eastside Road, May 12, 2018—

Muriel Barbery : The Elegance of the Hedgehog tr. from the French by Alison Anderson New York : Europa Editions, 2008 isbn 978-1-933372-60-0

Tania Romanov : Mother Tongue Palo Alto : Travelers’ Tales, 2018 isbn 978-1-509521-27-1

TWO VERY DIFFERENT BOOKS, a novel and a travel memoir, both full of insights into the human condition, individually and societally. I do think it important to read such books ; it enlarges our view of that condition, sharpening our awareness and sensitivity to the plight of others and thus deepening our understanding of the successes and failures common to us all.

Not everyone likes The Elegance of the Hedgehog. For many tastes it is, I suppose, too French, centered on life in an upscale six-storey Paris condominium, and too “intellectual,” with its (necessary) references to Marx, Husserl, Tolstoy, Mozart. But one reason it should be read by middlebrow American readers is its reminder that more literate societies are aware of such cultural identities: this is a theme of the novel.

It concerns one Renée Michel, a fortyish, plain, short, quite private widow who has worked as concierge in that condominium most of her life. There: she’s a concierge ; how many American readers will be comfortable with that? A sort of European version of a New York “super,” she sweeps the lobby, polishes the brass buttons of the elevator, receives deliveries, and keeps track of the comings and goings of visitors. To most of the residents she is invisible and inconsequential ; any meaningful private life she may have — let alone interesting ! — is unthinkable.

Except, in the course of the novel, Paloma, one of the several children in the building, a bright, observant, self-assured twelve-year-old who, though a girl, reminds me of Holden Caulfield for her uncanny identification of everything phony in the complacent society surrounding her: “ ‘Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is’ is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe.”

The men heading these families — a food critic who must have modeled for the animated film Ratatouille, a government minister, others presumably independently wealthy — are mostly absent from the narrative. Their wives are intent on shopping for identifiers of their social position and, to an extent, raising children who will take their place on this empty social staircase. Except for Paloma, whose first-person narrative alternates with the concierge’s in the elegant, effective structural balance of this novels, finally of course converging in a literal deus ex machina ending that has disappointed many readers but seems to me perfectly viable, both artistically and logically.

The book recalls others: Georges Perec’s W, or the Meaning of Childhood for its structure ; Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard for its moving death scene. It is often funny as well as sardonic and, think I, pointedly accurate in its view of intellectually empty, culturally joyless contemporary society. And the characters are memorable.

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Mother Tongue is, as I’ve said, quite another matter — artless rather than polished, straightforward rather than complex, descriptive rather than suggestive. The author, who I hasten to say has been an acquaintance for a number of years, was born in Serbia in 1949 to an White Russian (Ukraine) father and a Croatian mother, and spent her early childhood in a refugee camp in Trieste; the family finally reached the United States in 1953, settling in San Francisco. (I met her in Healdsburg, where she ultimately retired with her husband.)

The book is a record of her parents’ and (maternal) grandparents’ generations in what was then Yugoslavia, from the years just before World War II, when Mussolini’s ambitions reattached much of Slovenia and Croatia to Italy, through the formation and eventual crumbling of the Yugoslav state, down to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The result is an absorbing, memorable book full of attractive and sympathetic characters and non-judgmental political insights. Romanov begins with an account, humorous and evocative, of a trip she took with her husband and her aging mother — recovering from her husband’s recent death — to Istria, where they tried to find the family house and surviving cousins. From there the book flashes back to the grandparents’ time, when more-or-less secure and independent village life in such backwaters fell victim to the post-World-War-I realignment of the old Austro-Hungary.

Much of 20th-century history is the search for a new kind of security in the wake of destroyed imperialisms, and the case of the Balkans is particularly poignant. Settlers brought in by Italy displaced workers and farmers who’d been in Istria for centuries (though the grandfather proudly maintained his descent from immigrants from Montenegro, four hundred years earlier). For a time Tito’s benevolent dictatorship seemed able to hold society together, but in uncertain times, caught between the Soviet and American empires east and west, tribal assertiveness overcame any sense of community. Where once Christians and Moslems, Ukrainians, Serbs, Kosovars, Croatians, Montenegrins and Slovenians intermarried and lived in peace, inevitably the decline of social structures, weakened by interference from outside and exacerbated by power-hungry individuals within, led to violent conflict.

All that social history lies well below and behind the surface of Mother Tongue : to the credit of the author, I think, who intends to present simply the immediate human individual view of these circumstances, the excitement of transition, the triumph of survival and — in the case of her parents — transplanting to a promising new society.

The family members Romanov found in her journeys, with and without her mother, are engaging and sympathetic, sketched with a fond and expressive pen. The history is sad, inevitable, but ultimately, for the lucky, survivable. The book is warm and thoughtful.

How big a frog? how small a pond?

Eastside Road, May 3, 2018—

Fame or sanity

ah, old pond
frog leaping into
water noise

THAT'S BASHŌ*, of course; I'm thinking about it in connection with a friend who reaches out yet again, anguishing over public neglect of his work. He is a painter and a good one. We have known him for years; several of his paintings are on our walls.

For a time he was in the San Francisco Bay Area, to my mind a significant locus of painting (as of litereature, of music, of cuisine, of so much) — an area as rich with history and creative energy as any Paris, Vienna, London, or New York. Already then uncomfortable, I suspect, with his view of his place in such a center he ultimately settled in Santa Fe, ironically itself a smaller version of the same kind of cultural and artistic focus.

Here’s the problem: how does an artist (a composer, a writer, a painter) live and work with any degree of contentment in a global society addicted to fame? Why, my friend asks, does the art community — meaning the galleries, the museums, the critics — celebrate garbage instead of the true and faithful work he is doing?

By “garbage” — my shorthand, not my friend’s — he means gimmicks, the trendy, the wannabe intellectual. Doggy art: Giant topiary poodles; photographs of Weimaraners. And so on.

I tell him I think art is always local. By that I mean the artist responds to his life experiences, with the means and techniques he has learned. So the results of his work — his paintings, poems, musical compositions — are best given to his own community. Forget the international market; let it go to its own devil. I'm not sure it's better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond, but only because I think it's best to be an appropriately sized frog in one's own local pond.

Think of the exceptions as accidents. Rauschenberg, Thiebaud, Philip Glass, writers whose names I won’t think of because I rarely read current work — they are lucky beneficiaries of an essentially unjust system. Envy their wealth at the expense of your own contentment.

Of course in a just society one must make a living. In my youth I was impressed by the composer Charles Ives, who early decided not to pursue a career in music, so that he’d be free to write his kind of music, not music that would satisfy a paying public. Make a living in a related field, if you like — I myself chose journalistic criticism and a little bit of teaching. Or in a totally unrelated field.

The danger is that you will be considered a hobbyist or a dilettante. The greater danger is that your work will turn inward, lacking the feedback and commentary and coexistence with the work of others that enables it to stretch and grow.

Like so much else of the social sphere, art — and works of art, and the artists who make them — has thrived or not within successive forms of societal structure. The largesse of wealthy individuals, the support of social institutions, the whims of monarchs — and since the rise of capitalism the vagaries of the commercial market.

Recognize this, and make a living, and do your work. (And mind your business, my grandfather would have added.)

And don’t, I told my friend, don’t subscribe to the art magazines. Don’t read about the latest trends, the latest superstar; it’ll only make you resentful.

All that said, there is the question of marketing, even within your own community. You can buy my own books by clicking here. Be careful about the shipping fees!

*My translation, in 3-5-3, replacing the original 5-7-5