Victoria Donohoe
The Earl Kerkam (1891-1965) show at Johnny Aiello's “Gallery Pane Vino,” 20th Street at Pine, must surely be one of the best contemporary drawing exhibitions displayed in a gallery here. These 62 drawings have been lying unseen, mostly unknown except to a few scholars, and they come from the only large source of supply of the artist's work--- a collection of about 400 drawings and 200 oil paintings belonging to his son, E. Bruce Kirk, of Chestnut Hill, who displayed a few of the paintings at Wanamaker's last season and will show a larger group of the oils at New York's Zabriskie Gallery in January.
The drawings are nearly all spontaneous, unpretentious studies of the nude female figure and were created around the early 1950's as notes of fact and ideas rather than as developed essays. In their concentration of the artist's style, the few swift, decisive lines with a brush, chalk and watercolor speak with a personal intensity that tells us more than his painterly Cubist self-portraits or even his sensuous still lifes. And the finest of them have a weight, a sense of fleshiness and elegant informality of line that swing their lift into high art. Since drawings are an art for close-range inspection, the close grouping here, sometimes in double rows, favors them. This small gallery must be congratulated on its initiative in organizing the present show---a step that should long since have been taken by some of our more august institutions. It is also worth remembering that at the time of Kerkam's death, his friends deKooning, Guston, Rothko, Spaventa and Vicente petitioned the Museum of Modern Art to plan an exhibit in honor of this man who "in our eyes is one of the finest painters to come out America."
Labels: EXHIBITS OF OTHER ARTISTS
