“The Spiritual Landscapes
of Adrienne Farb, 1980-2006″
Cantor Art Gallery,
College of the Holy Cross,
Worcester, Massachusetts.
August 30, 2006-December 16, 2006
After a century in which it was first hailed as the art of the future, then as the triumph of postwar American painting, and ultimately challenged and reduced to one possibility amid many, what is the state of abstract art today? Frank Stella, once modernism’s golden boy, turned himself into an aesthetic contortionist decades ago, trying to escape the dead end into which he’d painted himself. Even earlier, Philip Guston provided the prescient example for many younger artists with his move back to representation. Beyond painting, the rise of Conceptual art and related practices tells a story far too familiar to need rehearsing here: as the critic Lane Relyea has written, “sometime between the ’60s and the ’80s, discourse replaced painting as the dominant medium in the art world.”
So the short answer to the question seems to be: “not good.” Yet many painters continue to work abstractly with success, and the exhibition “The Spiritual Landscapes of Adrienne Farb, 1980–2006” at the College of the Holy Cross offers a survey of just such a one. The Chicago-born Adrienne Farb, who returned to her native land in 2001 after more than two decades in Paris and (briefly) London, has spent her career painting abstractly, creating over the decades a body of work remarkable for its compositional fluidity and surprising color. The exhibition shows Farb’s development since