Myra Biggerstaff and the Wild Beasts A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Artist Myra Biggerstaff died last year, leaving the Museum of Nebraska Art work from a distinguished professional career spanning fifty years. In 1909, when she was four years old, her family moved from Indiana to Omaha. She lived the next fifteen years in Nebraska, then then went on to pursue a distinguished, international career as painter, educator and designer. She retired to Nebraska in 1986.

Biggerstaff is foremost a colorist. She was influenced by the Fauves, a group of French artists, including Matisse, who ushered color into the 20th Century with a radical new sensibility. Very simply, color was divorced from subject matter. Matisse painted a woman with a green face. Derain painted a Mediterranean landscape in orange. Their colors were usually bright, deep hued, and flat. The shock value of this challenge to convention was part of the movement's appeal, or insolence, depending upon your point of view. They used color as "sticks of dynamite." Fauves translated means "the wild beasts" a term attached to them by a puzzled critic, a term which has stuck to this day.

It is a stretch to characterize Biggerstaff s work as that of a "wild beast". Nonetheless, the expressive, fresh relationships she finds between color and content is informed by the freedom and sensibility of the Fauves.

In her watercolor, Portrait of a Young Man, we see a long, lean face, with a fleshy tan, cast to the skin. His eyes--deep, brown/black nuggets, are vacant, distracted and Penetrating. They would be interesting without further elaboration, but Biggerstaff sets them in blue sockets in the suggestion of blue eyelids and bags under the eyes. We associate black and blue with physical injury--perhaps Biggerstaff uses them here combined with the soulful gaze of the man to suggest emotional injury.

The outline of the face is comprised of thick brushstrokes containing rich, contrasting colors. The forehead and the right cheek of a delicious, thick, burgundy outline carried upward around his black beret and ears. A snake of deep, green/blue outlines his strong, jutting chin, crawls up his left and right cheeks and thickens into his ears and temples. It cascades into a broad plain of deep turquoise on the shoulders of his jacket. The sea of background red contrasts lushly with this turquoise and the tan flesh tones, giving them heightened brilliance.

This thick, color drenched outline of the face suggests something else, the edge of a mask, a suggestion reinforced by the neutral, vacant stare of the man. A harlequin perhaps? One of those lean, melancholy harlequins of Picasso, with jacket and tie? Perhaps. There is daring here, a generous helping of that Fauve sauciness. We are in league with Myra, and those wild beasts.