Leonard Thiessen's "Still Life with Lemons"
A MONA Moment |
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He was the 20th Century version of the Renaissance man: the State Director for the Iowa Federal Art Project from 1941 to 1942; art critic for the Omaha World-Herald from 1938 to 1950; founding member and first director of the Nebraska Arts Council; enthusiastic supporter of the Museum of Nebraska Art. His life spanned most of the 20th Century. He was, arguably, the most dominant voice in Nebraska's visual arts scene during his lifetime, and a gifted and versatile artist in his own right. We see him later in life in a photograph by Larry Ferguson, with a simple robe draped over his shoulders, looking very much like Picasso, a bit stooped but indominatable, eyes burning with energy and passion.
In his oil painting, Still Life with Lemons, of 1936, we see the work of an artist very much in touch with important stylistic influences of his era. The debt to Cezanne is clear. There is a solidity to the forms, they are suspended in a vertical plane before our eyes, hovering, yet firmly in place throught the confident architecture of rigorously incised geometric shapes, volumes of bowl, peach, book and lightbulb. Like Cezanne, Thiessen looks at these forms as sculpture, rather than flat forms in two dimensions. Here is a virtuoso excercise in that seminal Cezanne discovery: that depth and the third dimension could be achieved throught the subtle modulation of color and shading, without the traditional Renaissance aid of linear perspective, where parallel lines and edges of surfaces recede at the same angle into a vanishing point. Forget about line. A thin, dark shadow Thiessen has incised at the base of the bowl and the gray-yellow modeling of its side push the bowl and its peaches out into our space. This sculptural effect is so vivid, I have the feeling that the painting was literally chiselled out of a block of color. This response is, I believe, in large part due to the textural effects of the surface of the painting. Much of the paint is applied with the consistency of a thick paste, called impasto. There is a burnished quality here, as if he has treated the surface with rough sandpaper Again, another of Cezanne's techniques, applied with sure virtuosity by Thiessen.
There is a defining color key unfiying work: peach--the color of those abrasive, dark skinned peaches you see in the supermarket. It resembles the color of those lemons in that bowl, the color of rotting lemons. Artist Larry Peterson knew Thiessen, and has suggested to me Thiessen was perhaps not the most particular of house keepers. It is in keeping with Thiessen's personality and sense of irony that perhaps, he would use rotting lemons.
And it is certainly in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the objects of this still life: a lightbulb, a used roll of masking tape, an old frayed book. What an enjoyable irony, this affirmative statement on behalf of the common object as opposed to the more traditional still life with its bouquets of flowers and fruit in impeccably staged array. Here we have the common man's still life, the WPA still life, made rich and evocative by a Nebraska master, Leonard Thiessen.
