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Works by Gerome Kamrowski shows artist's ability to keep pace with the old and the new.
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 12, 2002
TARPON SPRINGS -- An exhibition of work by American surrealist Gerome Kamrowski could not come at a better time. In this post-Sept. 11 era of angst and anxiety, when the majority of aesthetic responses have tended toward the overly literal or heavy-handed, artists such as Kamrowski remind us that art can respond to calamity in ways that are not cliched.
"Kamrowski: An American Surrealist" at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is a survey of the artist's career arranged chronologically from the 1930s to the present. Kamrowski is 88 and still producing.
He was a Midwesterner, born in Minnesota, a child of the Depression who had little formal art training. He found work with the WPA painting murals but rejected the regionalism the projects nurtured in artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Drawn to New York, Kamrowski immersed himself in political and social ideas, especially those associated with surrealism, a movement engendered by European intellectuals weary of war-mongering nationalism and contemptuous of almost every aesthetic convention of the time.
The American hybrid of the movement that Kamrowski and his peers founded came of age during revelations of the Holocaust, the devastation of atomic warfare and the optimism of post-World War II recovery. The resulting combination of cynicism and hope made for provocative art.
The earliest painting in the show is a still life dated 1933. It shows his initial allegiance to a movement known as geometric abstraction, which will make viewers think of cubism. From there flows a progression of paintings in the expected surrealist idiom of biomorphic forms (think protozoa under a microscope) and automatism -- an idea associated with psychologist Carl Jung in which the artist tries to suspend his conscious mind and draw unpremeditated images released by the unconscious. The surprise is that art laboring under such a heavy framework of ideas can be ephemeral.
Lean into Tears from the Eyes of Mr. Horror, 1945, and Benevolent Eye, 1946, and marvel at the layers of images he piles up, like transparencies stacked on a light table.
Personal tragedy changed Kamrowski's life in 1945. His wife of two years died of cancer. Kamrowski decided he had to find work that would provide a steady income and allow him to care for his 1-year-old son. A teaching position at University of Michigan turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him artistically. Summers off gave him the opportunity to visit New York haunts and renew associations. But, by being away from New York, he was able to avoid the excesses of many of his peers, such as Jackson Pollock and resist the artistic influences that might have diluted his surrealist vision.
Kamrowski's work might have become bitter and brooding. Instead, he found new inspiration and new collaborations. His paintings become ever more subtle and densely textured. He no longer creates translucent layers that deconstruct a form; he builds them up into monumental impastos. Works such as Warm Surface of a Secret Sun, 1959, seem to suggest that we not concern ourselves with what lies beneath; what you see might be all there is.
You can't get much more existential than that, yet he continued to mine a spiritual vein in his work. He collaborated with Buckminster Fuller, who was also at the University of Michigan, on a series of geodesic dome panels "like the ceilings in European cathedrals," he said. "You look up to heaven and you're not seeing a void, you're seeing something beautiful."
In Kamrowski's paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, the exquisitely detailed biomorphic forms of his early work became thick blobs of color coalescing into fantastical shapes. At some point, he liberated those heavy forms, making them into three-dimensional creatures embellished with beads. Still surreal in spirit, they are also lighthearted and spritely.
Even the existential preoccupation with materialism has lightened up; he now fashions mosaics from shards of iridescent glass. It's a process that has to begin with something being smashed to bits and ends with reordering and rearrangement. Sometimes, the result is beautiful.
The mosaics mirror a world that has exploded around Kamrowski more than once. As an artist, he understood how to pick up the pieces and make something new.
"Kamrowski: An American Surrealist" is at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art on the Tarpon Springs campus of St. Petersburg College, 600 Klosterman Road, through Oct. 27. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults with discounts for seniors and students. Sundays by donation. (727) 712-5762.