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- BARET BOISSON ['81]: URBANE PRIMITIVEBy Peter FrankLos Angeles, November 2007 Baret Boisson ('81) sent us this rave review of her art, which we are happy to re-publish here. (To see more of her art, click on link below) "Much has been made in our time of the “urban primitive,” the city dweller – even sophisticate – who nevertheless practices a kind of art that draws upon raw impulse and unpolished talent. Urban primitivism presumes not the guileless vision of a naïf or the obsessive pictorrhea of someone beset with mental illness, but the street-smart sureness of a mind and hand that have decided what to depict, and taught themselves how to depict it, simply by observing the world out the door. The effulgent alphabetism of “Wild Style” graffiti may be the ultimate urban-primitive art, but there exists – and has long existed – a more private urban primitivism centered on the picture-making ability of individuals. It is this last tradition, at least as old as our country, that Baret Boisson sustains. "Boisson grew up the child of academy-trained artists; she was clearly to the manner born. She resisted the call that had lured both parents and made wanderers of them. Although she has spent countless hours visiting museums and poring over art books, to this day, Boisson has spent nary an hour studying artistic technique of any kind. But the art gene flowed in her veins, and repeated bites by the art bug finally rattled it awake. Boisson began making pictures essentially because she could no longer resist doing so. "What kind of art do you make when you haven’t been trained to make any, but you’ve been surrounded by it your whole life? A straightforward, quasi-iconic painting, a painting reliant on simple forms and colors rather than nuanced verism; on verbally explicated content rather than inferred narrative; on character rather than caricature. Look at the work of Morris Hirschfield, John Kane, or even Henri Rousseau, outsider artists all, working in cities. They were aware of the art, even the contemporary art, around them but, knowingly or not, worked at some practical distance from it. They may have aspired to the mainstream, and the mainstream may have embraced them, but the mainstream embraced them precisely because these autodidacts made paintings whose appeal was their simplicity, their starkness, their forthrightness. "Boisson knows that she inherits not from Picasso or Matisse, but from their friend Rousseau. This knowledge in itself may make her that much less an outsider, but it makes her no less an artist, and certainly no less a genuine urban primitive. Her ability to capture personality comes not from her ability to render faces accurately, but to render expressions, presences, vividly. This is not the work of a gifted child, however crude the depiction of perspective, however dense the painting itself, but the work of a mature mind attuned to the uniqueness of personhood. "It is also attuned to the particulars of time and place. Central to Boisson’s oeuvre to date is her series paying homage to great women and men of American history, particularly individuals who have militated for equal rights and dignity – Lincoln, King, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali – but also those personages who have helped make the United States, for all its faults, a paradigm worldwide for hope and freedom. Here, in her extra-artistic aspiration, we might indeed label Boisson a naïf; certainly, her glorification of such individuals is o so un-critical, so un-cynical, so un-post-modern. But (beyond the fact that, these days, the uncool is cool) it is precisely Boisson’s uncomplected reverence for these crucial figures in our recent past that makes her “Great Americans” series so compelling. She regards them as schoolbook figures, apotheosized into sociopolitical saints, icons for those who would strive higher and for those who still suffer inequality and oppression, here and abroad. And in her simple way, infused almost incongruously with passion, Boisson’s regard for these Great Americans becomes contagious, and begins to renew our own admiration, patriotism, and hope." |
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