Category: Paintings Page 1 of 46

Eric Mesko @ Hatch Gallery

On July 24, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Drawing, Paintings, Sculpture

Eric Mesko, Self Portraits, 1990, 10” x 15”, acrylic on cardboard.

Disorientation, exhilaration, and amusement are feelings gallery visitors will experience upon walking into Hatch Gallery right now, where work by Detroit artist Eric Mesko is on display. “Eric Mesko Ain’t Dead Yet” is a retrospective of sorts, though not a complete one. Christopher Schneider and Sean Bieri, who curated the exhibition, have selected a generous slice of Mesko’s 50-year output from a rich trove of art and artifacts in the artist’s Ferndale house and studio. Most of the work is from the 1990s and gives a taste, at least, of the preoccupations and style of expression of this artist and activist, whose work was described by Rebecca Mazzei of the Detroit Metro Times in 2005 as “extreme expressionism.”

Eric Mesko, Oil Wars, 1990, 24” x 36” acrylic and oil stick on board.

Mesko’s childhood in the 1940s, as the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, gave him a unique position from which to view the place of America on the world stage, for good or ill. His frequent moves from military base to base, both in the U.S. and worldwide, gave him a global perspective on both his own American identity and world cultures. Though an inveterate natural draftsman from an early age, Mesko didn’t take an art class until his last year in high school. He enlisted in the Marines after graduation and served three years, until 1967, and only began to study art seriously in the late 1980s when he earned both a B.F.A and an M.F.A. from Wayne State University.

Eric Mesko, installation, Exhibition poster (2024), small Uvalde Kid, (n.d.) wood, found objects.

In a 2002 essay on Mesko, Dick Goody, Director of the Oakland University Art Gallery, described his work as “more steeped in the traditions of cartoon comics than twentieth-century art,” a statement that is both accurate and incomplete. While many of the works on paper undeniably reference the visual tropes of comic books, Mesko’s sculptures equally suggest his deep familiarity with Chicago Imagists like H.C. Westermann and with post-World War II folk art traditions such as hand-painted signs and improvised cultural artifacts. He also claims familiarity with, and appreciation for, American regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton, and even names Jackson Pollock and El Lissitzky as influences. In the end it is impossible, and possibly pointless, to describe Mesko as either an insider or an outsider. His work, while encompassing all these influences, has coalesced into its own unique perspective; he is both insider and outsider, a sophisticated thinker making work within a primitivist visual idiom.

Eric Mesko, Batter, (n,d) wood assemblage, found objects,

Eric Mesko, Uvalde Kid, 1998, 30” x 42” x 17” wood, found objects.

Many of the recurring images in the exhibition circle around the identity and meaning of American masculinity. G.I.’s., baseball players and cowboys figure prominently In Mesko’s personal iconography as symbols of American values past and present. The Uvalde Kid, named after one of many childhood homes of the artist, is one of the larger assemblages in the exhibition. Astride his horse and brandishing a pistol, he is a reminder that frontier violence is an enduring feature of the American psyche, recently made immediate by the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas. The G.I.’s in Mesko’s pictures, too, practice sanctioned violence in furtherance of national goals. Yet they seem helpless, cogs in an oil-fueled war machine. His large acrylic and oil stick painting on panel Oil Wars (1990) and the small wooden tank that sits in front of it, are two of several artworks that reference the wars in Iraq and the U.S.’s historically vexed relationship to the oil economy.

Eric Mesko, Oil Warrior, 1991, 11” x 14,” Ink and watercolor on paper

Lest all of this should appear too grim, let it be noted that many of Mesko’s images and artifacts are comic. In Self Portrait as Lord Greystoke, the artist pictures himself as Tarzan, bemused atop a herd of hippos. In another large painting, Mesko portrays the sculptor Tony Smith in a battle for art supremacy, King Kong vs. Godzilla style. Mesko’s pictures can be light-hearted, even silly, although they often make an ironic point, as in his American Voter drawing.

Eric Mesko, Self-Portrait as Lord Greystoke, 1984., 11” x 14,” ink and watercolor on paper.

The world’s oceans and the fish that swim in them are also favorite images in “Ain’t Dead Yet.” The sculpture Moby Dick (1990, now in the Wayne State University art collection) is a virtuosic evocation, in found materials, of Captain Ahab’s mythic nemesis. The series Jonah and The Whale, ten paintings on vintage New York Times papers, tell what would have been a really big fish story if only there had been newspapers in Biblical times. The altered book Fish or Cut Bait recounts another, more intimate tale of idyllic fishing trips. A large assemblage, Great Fish of Ferndale, anchors the center of the gallery.

Eric Mesko, Jonah and the Whale (series), 1989, acrylic on New York Times

Mesko describes and critiques contemporary mass culture in America as more conformist, more materialistic and more predatory than the local, particularized regional artifacts and architecture of his American childhood in the 1940’s. “I grew up,” he says, “in the last era where idealism still meant something …The innocence of all that is lost but it wasn’t a fake innocence because in the late forties there was still a lot of idealism in the country and somehow that was important to me from an early age.”

Eric Mesko, American Voter, 1992, 9” x 12,” Ink on paper

After the initial shock and awe of encountering Mesko’s extraordinary vision, we begin to understand his unsentimental assessment of America and Americans. He may be a disillusioned patriot, but he retains enough optimism to keep working into his eighties. As he has put it, “We have to face our future head-on and accept our tasks with determination.“ Or, in the parlance of the show’s title, “We ain’t dead yet.”

Hatch Gallery

Hamtramck, MI

https://www.hatchart.org/

July 13 to August 4, 2024

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

By K.A. Letts

On July 2, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Paintings

**Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment, New Work by Lakela Brown @ Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit**

Visitors to MOCAD this summer will have four new shows to enjoy, each adding a facet to the kaleidoscopic multicultural Detroit art scene. At the entrance to the museum, we find “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7.” It’s a collection of significant objects and images providing a window into the art world of the late 1960’s, post-rebellion, when African American artists in Detroit achieved a collective sense of themselves and their purpose. Next, Lakela Brown’s first solo museum show “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” looks to a future that explores Black experience through racially specific foodways and styles of personal adornment. Drawing our attention out to the broader landscape, Meleko Mokgosi , a Botswanan artist and academic now living in the U.S., provides a scholarly examination of Black artists as they have seen themselves and are seen by others through the lens of colonialism and diasporic history. Lastly, in Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, museum visitors will find a more informal conversation among the city’s artists, curators, and administrators on the collaborative nature of art presentation.

With apologies to the creatives responsible for “Zones of Non-Being” and “Word of Mouth,” and meaning no disrespect, l will concentrate here upon the artists represented in “Kinship” and “From Scratch. “

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7

Those with a particular interest in the art history of Detroit and of the African American artists working in abstraction in particular, will have the pleasure of seeing a selection of work by some of the city’s most significant practitioners, many represented by the iconic Gallery 7, which showed outstanding work by Black (male) artists from 1969-1979. (In a spirit of retrospective reparation for past gender discrimination, Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, the curator of the exhibition, has also tactfully included work by several contemporaneous female artists, Elizabeth Youngblood, Gilda Snowden, and Naomi Dickerson.)

Fernandez has done an admirable job of telling the story of this seminal period in the city’s art history by employing a small, but choice, selection of artworks begged and borrowed from collectors, the artists themselves or their estates. A welcome bonus is a newspaper-style publication accompanying the exhibition, which includes a well-researched and written short history of the gallery by the curator. The compilation of contemporary press coverage that accompanies his essay goes a long way toward explaining the excitement that accompanied the art that was shown there during the gallery’s ten-year existence. It is also a melancholy reminder of how much the art audience lost when intelligent art journalism in Detroit’s mainstream newspapers ceased with the advent of the Internet.

Lester Johnson (b. 1937) The Sorceress and the Dreamtime Spirits, 1974, installation: wood, fabric, vegetal fiber, feathers, bells. All images courtesy of K.A. Letts

Several of the artists in “Kinship” take inspiration from African artifacts. One of the show’s highlights is The Sorceress and The Dreamtime Spirits (1974) 9 wall-mounted sculptures by Lester Johnson that mimic the form of West African ceremonial objects. The long rods made of found branches and poles are fabricated and decorated with industrial and post-industrial materials, a process Johnson describes as “creating a hybrid product between ancestors and urban present.”

Elizabeth Youngblood (b. 1952) Loop 8, 2015, porcelain and wire.

Loop 8, by Elizabeth Youngblood, subtly references Black personal adornment, a recurring theme in the art of female African Americans, as we see in Lakela Brown’s nearby solo show. (But more on that later.) Using the simplest means of expression, wire, and barely modeled porcelain clay, Youngblood teases out tremulous but insistent meaning from humble materials.

Harold Neal, a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970’s, is represented in “Kinship” by Brotherhood, a medium-sized, text-heavy artwork that wears its racial advocacy on its sleeve. The artist’s work, through the 1960’s and 1970s when Gallery 7 was in operation, was figurative and militantly political. As a movement leader, he led a faction of Black creatives whose radical work was in tension, if not in opposition, to the more cerebral concerns of his fellow gallery artists. (A recently published history of this group, “Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 through the Black Arts Movement” by Julia R. Myers, is available from Amazon.)

Harold Neal (1924-1996) Brotherhood, n.d., oil on board.

The art practice of the Gallery 7 artists focused primarily on their own personal experience as African Americans, or as gallery founder Charles McGee explained, “My roots are in America, and the ideas I deal with as an artist come out of this time and place.” McGee occupies a special position in Detroit’s art history. In addition to his importance as the force behind Gallery 7, he was an influential arts educator and a leader in the African American art community. Many of his public artworks can be seen throughout the city, and his importance was recently acknowledged by a posthumous survey of his work in the newly opened Shepherd in Detroit’s Little Village. Ring Around the Rosy, an early McGee work from the 1960s, is a tantalizing glimpse of the artist’s figurative work before he moved in a less conventional direction.

Charles McGee (1924-2021) Ring Around the Rosy, ca 1950’s, oil on board.

Allie McGhee, a significant Detroit artist honored by a major retrospective in 2022 at Cranbrook Art Museum, is represented here by a couple of lively abstract paintings. The Artist in his Studio (1973) is chromatically subdued, allowing the gestural line to take center stage. His recurring use of a personal icon, the banana moon horn, was first seen during his tenure at Gallery 7 and continues in his current work, a personal, idiosyncratic emblem of ancestral energy brought from the past into the present. Coco Blue (1984), a more colorful cousin to The Artist in His Studio, is typical of McGhee’s later work and exhibits the exuberant presence typical of his paintings.

Allie McGhee (b. 1941) Artist in the Studio, 1973, mixed media on Masonite.

Allie McGhee, Coco Blue, 1984, mixed media on Masonite.

Album, a self-portrait by Gilda Snowden, is a psychological and physical evocation of the artist, an embodiment of her tempestuous and elusive power. Her unexpected and premature death in 2014 cut short a promising career, but this painting preserves her positive presence. It is an enduring influence she shares with the eminent artists represented in “Kinship.”

Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) Album, 1989, oil on canvas.

Artists represented in “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7” Namoi Dickerson, Lester Johnson, Charles McGee, Allie McGhee, Harold Neal, Gilda Snowden, Robert J. Stull, Elizabeth Youngblood. June 28-September 8, 2024

From Scratch: Seeding Adornment

LaKela Brown describes her first solo museum show, “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” as a love letter to her community. “I want to center culturally significant objects that challenge and hopefully correct historic […] notions of value and taste while loving the brilliance and ingenuity of my community,” she explains. Brown practices a kind of archeology in reverse—preserving present cultural artifacts for future appreciation rather than searching for ancient objects to excavate and exploit. She is looking forward rather than back.

Lakela Brown, Parts and Labor (Eight Collard Green Leaves, Five Hands) 2024, urethane resin.

Brown, who grew up in West Detroit, has filled two large galleries at MOCAD with resin and plaster casts of foods specifically related to the culture of the Black diaspora and objects of personal adornment, particularly doorknocker earrings. The materials she uses to create these artworks are well-known to artists and lend an air of elegance and permanence by their association with classical museum casts.

Lakela Brown, Doorway to Adornment, 2024, site-specific installation, urethane resin.

The first gallery features resin casts of vegetables– collard greens, corn, okra–artfully arranged on the gallery walls in square formats. In a surreal touch, and in tribute to her matriarchal connections, the artist tucks barely visible casts of the delicate hands of her grandmother, Evelyn Helen Brown, in among the vegetables. Though the usual designation for artworks featuring food is still life, these pieces, in the formality of their presentation and their low-relief arrangement on a rectilinear base, seem to be more architectural in nature. In particular, the ruffled edges of the collard greens call to mind decorative rococo details one might see in an 18th-century European drawing room. Brown makes the comparison explicit with the site-specific row of cast collard greens installed over the doorway to the second gallery, Gateway to Adornment (2024). With her casts of ethnically specific doorknocker earrings, chain necklaces, and other ornaments to the body—including casts of crowned teeth—Brown taps into a rich vein of visual associations she shares with many of her contemporaries. A case in point is the work of Tiff Massey, now on view at the DIA, which features hair ornaments—oversized ponytail ties and enormous replicas of Snaptite Kiddie Barrettes, as well as an entire wall of hair weaves. The exhibition’s curator, Jova Lynne, who also shares many of Brown’s creative interests in her own work, says, “Lakela’s practice is a mirror to Black legacies that encourage people across the diaspora, including myself, to take pride in reflections of home…In her work, I see the cultivation of land, the preservation of adornment, and the production of artworks acting as ledgers of Black life.”

Lakela Brown, Coverall Composition with Doorknocker Earrings. , Gold (2023) plaster

The exhibitions on view now at MOCAD emphatically demonstrate the interrelated nature of the art community in Detroit, a true commonwealth of creatives who share philosophies, exchange materials and cross-pollinate cultures. Born of common experience, each collection of artworks forms part of a contrapuntal melody–or maybe a jazz improvisation–of mutually reinforcing themes which flow from one gallery to the next and out into the city.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

Group Exhibition @ M Contemporary

By Michael Hodges

On June 9, 2024

In Paintings

General Rules Do Not Apply at Ferndale’s M Contemporary gives a quick, refreshing tour of the lyrical possibilities of colorful abstraction produced by an intriguing set of Detroit artists: Matt Eaton (now in Los Angeles), Lauren Harrington, MALT, Jaime Pattison, Senghor Reid, Zach Thompson and Dino Valdez. General Rules is up through June 15.

Jaime Pattison, Afterimages, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 58 1/2 inches, 2024. (Photos courtesy of M Contemporary).

These are sophisticated abstracts — even if Zach Thompson’s striking, half-and-half canvas stars, respectively, Wylie Coyote and Pig-Pen of “Peanuts” fame. Indeed, taken as a whole, the contrast in stylistic approach from one artist to the next is exhilarating.

A downright mesmerizing work is Jaime Pattison’s Afterimages. This is a severe gridwork composition, yet rendered in utterly seductive shades of startling red and aquamarine where the former frames the latter with thin, wispy lines to great visual effect. It’s all rather high concept. Pattison’s playing with what happens when you stare at intense red good and hard, and then close your eyes. The “after image” that pops up leaps from the opposite side of the color spectrum, almost like a photographic negative. And after looking at red, that negative will always be some shade of green.

Each of the 140 aquamarine rectangles within its red frame is a tiny, meticulously constructed abstract in itself, giving the whole a visual depth that, combined with the shock of the red – in this case approaching a neon intensity — is pretty darned transfixing.

In an April interview with the online publication Canvas Rebel, Pattison says she’s been working on “a series of large dichromatic paintings investigating notions of the screen and embodiment. Painting for me is an analog process,” she added, “a process based in the hand, a sifting through digital material to make connections to this time.”

Gallery director Melannie Chard says she’s been following Pattison, who hails from Toronto, since she first saw her work a couple years ago in the annual Student Exhibition at the College for Creative Studies. At the time, Chard says, Pattison was working in a figurative vein, “but now she’s moving into pattern” –- for which we should all be grateful.

Zach Thompson, The Coyote Has to Eat Too, Oil pigment stick, spray paint, and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

If Afterimages gives an impression of freehand precision, the left half of Zach Thompson’s canvas, titled The Coyote Has to Eat Too, announces itself with a blast of what appears to be slapdash enthusiasm, with an array of colorful, “careless” blotches scattered across a vivid yellow background.

At once comic and disturbing, the visual focus is our friend Wylie Coyote, lying prone in the bottom-right corner, as if shortly after being obliterated by one of those falling anvils he always seemed to attract like metal filings to a magnet. There’s also a miniature version of Mr. Coyote up above, on the edge of a vortex of swirling hues, holding a teensy sign reading, “Why me?” — a question that can’t help but trigger a laugh, even as it gets to the heart of the human condition.

A similar mix of the absurd and the profound characterizes the other half of Thompson’s work, Everything Returns to Dirt, which sports Charles Schulz’s Pig-Pen floating over, of all things, a roosting parrot. Rendered in an array of rich earth tones, including burnt orange, Thompson pulls off another oddball composition that just won’t let go.

Dino Valdez, Family Values, Acrylic and silver leaf on canvas, 72 x 48 x 1 1/2 inches, 2024.

Ready for something completely different? Painted in black acrylic and elegant silver leaf, Dino Valdez’s Family Values stands out in marvelous counterpoint to the color-rich works surrounding it. An energetic swirl of highly textured black brush strokes, Valdez, formerly exhibitions director at Red Bull House of Art Detroit, manages to achieve a surprising amount of depth that feels downright three-dimensional.

His CV says his recent work focuses on the understanding of violence, conflict, and resolution, which would seem to sum up Family Values, with its barely suppressed fury, rather neatly. Anchoring this visual storm is one perfectly straight white line (although it reads as gray in the image above) that seems to prevent the turbulence from blowing away and dissipating.

Chard says this particular piece is related Valdez’s martial-arts training, and likens the work to that of the classic abstract expressionist Franz Kline, “but not as aggressive. I like Family Values because it almost looks like a dance,” she added, “so expressive and so much energy behind it.”

Matt Eaton, Celestial Blanket (Yellow), Aerosol on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

Once an energetic presence in Detroit connected with the Library Street Collective, Contra Projects and Red Bull House of Art before his move to the West Coast, Matt Eaton has sketched out a career exploring inventive possibilities in the world of abstraction. Using materials associated with graffiti and graphic arts alike, Eaton’s work has been characterized by a skilled use of color and form.

At M Contemporary, his four identically sized canvases are hung in a square like four panes of a window, through each of which we see what appears to be a piece of fabric fluttering in the air as if hung from a clothesline. Two of these are in rich colors, as with (Yellow) above, while the other two are composed in black and silvery tones. Taken altogether, they make a rich stew.

In a 2016 interview with The Detroit News, Eaton credited the visual universe of the 1980s with steering his artistic instincts in a particular direction. “Growing up at the end of the good punk-rock age,” he said, “there was a lot of hugely influential graphic design at the time. I genuinely would be content if nobody ever saw my art again,” he added. “I’m compelled to make it. It’s more a meditative ritual than a career.”

Senghor Reid, Decision at Sundown 6, Acrylic on canvas, 2024.

If Eaton’s blankets mine the potential of simplicity, Senghor Reid’s Decision at Sundown 6 deals with almost stupefying complexity and detail. An explosion of line and squiggle radiating out from a central core near the bottom, it almost reads like – going way out on a limb, here – a visual representation of nuclear fission.

But Chard, who would know, says Decision actually has water as its subject. “It’s one of Senghor’s abstracted water series,” she said. “A lot of people recognize him for portraiture and figurative work, but he has a whole other part of his practice that deals with water, water justice and water rights.” Indeed, anyone who caught last winter’s Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit at the Cranbrook Art Museum might note the resemblance — in line, at least — between Decision at Sundown and the swimming pool in the artist’s large, cheerful Make Way for Tomorrow, that was one of the focal points of that exhibition.

Zach Thompson, Everything Returns to Dirt (detail), Oil pigment stick, spray paint, acrylic, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

General Rules Do Not Apply will be up at Ferndale’s M Contemporary through June 15.

Benjamin Pritchard @ David Klein Gallery

By Ron Scott

On April 13, 2024

In Paintings

Installation image of three paintings DKG 4, 2024

Artist Benjamin Pritchard opened a solo exhibition, Nature Worship, comprised of paintings at the David Klein Gallery on March 23, that will run through May 4, 2024. The thick oil paint in these mostly monochromatic compositions with heavy line work, either dark or light backgrounds, are Expressionistic Abstractions with attention paid to the structure by working in multiple layers of color that seek to find the balance and substance in each canvas.

Prichard grew up in Franklin, Michigan, and set voyage to grad school in London, earning his MFA from the Royal Academy of Arts to time spent on the West Coast, ending up in Brooklyn, N.Y., only to return home to a small studio space that seemed to nurture and find answers.

He says, “The irony is that I left for so long to find a solution or an answer… And then, of course, I come back, and here it is. It’s always been right here.”

Benjamin Prichard, Light Years, 108×132″, Oil on Canvas, All images courtesy of DKG

It is easy to say the painting that dominates the exhibition is Light Years. This large (108 x 132”) diptych does so with its scale. The orange and red circular organic motifs place themselves throughout this roadmap of lines and shapes. The feel of these designs can be described as a field of organic Petroglyphs (not figurative but more plant-like) that meander space informally. If only all these paintings were larger in scale, the power and influence would follow.

Benjamin Pritchard, Structure/Surface, 36×30″, Oil on Canvas.

One of the most successful smaller paintings (36×30”) is Structure/Surface, where Prichard divides the rectangle with a white line. Here, the artist lays down an attractive grid over a black horizontal field of brush strokes.

Benjamin Pritchard, Arboreal, 48×36″, Oil on Canvas

The painting Arboreal (48×36″) pulls on the heartstrings from the sky in The Starry Night by Van Gogh, using an Ellipse shape instead of circles. However, color and abstract expressionism are present in both. The spirit of Van Gogh lives in the sky, while the spirit in Arboreal lives in the trees.

In a statement from New York Artist Equity, he says, “I like to think that the direct, honest daily practice of painting over time reflects both the cares and concerns of the deep self and an optimistic projection regarding concerns of the world. I believe that being with work over long periods reveals humanistic qualities in relation to the observer and is added to by the viewer. In this way, art functions as both psychic nourishment and as a mirror to the self and the world. I think of painting as a quasi-religious activity involving the concept of the sacred. What this actually means and how it is represented is revealed piece by piece in the work. In this way, I think that the subject of painting exists outside of language and is more involved with the unsayable experiential aspects of life and the world.”

Artist Benjamin Pritchard at the home studio

Benjamin Pritchard is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Detroit. He has had solo exhibitions at Daniel Weinberg Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY), and Life on Mars (Brooklyn, NY). The artist earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He attended the New York Studio School from 1994-1996. Ben Pritchard lives and works in Detroit and Brooklyn.

Benjamin Prichard’s Nature Worship at the David Klein Gallery on March 23 will run through May 4, 2024.

Look At Me! Look At Me Now! Magical World of Dr. Seuss @ Art Leaders Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On March 16, 2024

In Drawing, Paintings

An installation view of Look At Me! Look A Me Now! Exhibition at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery, up through March 30.

In a treat for anyone who loves cartoons, The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: The Rare Editions Exhibition will be up at Art Leaders Gallery in West Bloomfield through March 30, 2024. On Saturday, March 23, the gallery will host a special open house for the Seuss exhibit from 3 to 6 p.m.

This show of prints and sculptures, which you’ll find at the center of the Art Leaders space, is surprisingly magnetic. On display are a number of treasures that will appeal to fans, including several “before and after” pairings, where the original rough draft – with multiple, seemingly messy lines working out each visual element – is framed in a diptych with the polished, final version. It makes for fun viewing and gives a little glimpse into the process that produces what looks like simple art.

Consider the two versions of Look at Me Now, starring Seuss’ best-known creation, the Cat in the Hat, who’s juggling all manner of breakable items while balancing on a ball. It’s classic Seussian absurdity, and an almost universally recognizable childhood image.

Dr. Seuss, Look At Me Now!, Look At Me Now!, Diptych, 26.5 by 17.5 inches. (Photos courtesy of Art Leaders Gallery.)

Dr. Seuss published his first children’s book, “And to Think I Saw That on Mulberry Street,” in 1937. But it was “The Cat in the Hat” exactly 20 years later that really catapulted the artist into the pop-cult stratosphere. It was fame that never flagged. His death in 1991 at 87 prompted all sorts of elegiac summaries: In its front-page obituary, the New York Times called Seuss “the modern Mother Goose,” while Time Magazine declared he was “one of the last doctors to make house calls – some 200 million of them in 20 languages.”

(“The Cat in the Hat,” by the way, was significant not just for its unhinged hero — who generated childish excitement and anxiety in equal measure — but also because it employed a limited vocabulary of about 220 “beginner’s words” recommended by reading specialists. Seuss then wrote it all up in a cadence — “anapestic tetrameter,” if you must — that was particularly easy for young readers to master and learn. From there on in, his books aimed to make learning how to read fun – quite a shift from the old “Dick and Jane” primers of the time.)

One of the charms of Seuss’ work, of course, has always been its complete lack of pretension and his willingness to make fun of himself. Four months after the launch of “Cat in the Hat,” the Saturday Evening Post helped the artist do just that when it ran what would become the most-iconic Seuss self-portrait, The Cat Behind the Hat – featuring the good doctor as his famous feline, looking dyspeptic, complete with stovepipe hat – in its July 6, 1957 issue.

Dr. Seuss, The Cat Behind the Hat, 20 by 10 inches.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss – initially got his start in advertising. Two years out of Dartmouth College in 1927, the young Geisel, from Springfield, Massachusetts, got a job drawing ads for “The Flit” — a household insecticide spray Standard Oil of New Jersey produced which promised to kill almost anything that crept, fluttered or crawled. Charmingly, the style of one ad from the early forties is unmistakably Seuss-ian, with an impish bug in a red-striped shirt who’s just flown right through a woman’s fancy hat, sparking predictable outrage.

Once Seuss was working full-time on children’s literature – his output was staggering – he took to working on his own personal art at night and on weekends, much of which is in the Art Leaders exhibition. Some, like the luridly colored Worm Glowing Bright in the Forest in the Night, approach abstract expressionism, albeit with the puckish intrusion of a befuddled yellow worm. Others, like Life’s a Great Balancing Act, play with patterns in a way that’s slightly reminiscent of Escher, but always, again, with a dash of oddball humor.

Dr. Seuss, Life’s a Great Balancing Act, 30.75 by 22 inches.

A man of his times, Seuss has, perhaps inevitably, come under fire for depictions of minorities that now seem tone-deaf and condescending. The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, announced in 2017 that it would replace a mural that included such images. And in 2021, the Seuss estate said it would voluntarily stop selling six titles, including Mulberry Street, thought to contain egregious examples of racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Happily, the art in this spirited exhibition avoids those sorts of dated allusions. Most just underlines Dr. Seuss’ gift for enchanting idiocy, and his ability to spin magical, gossamer worlds out of thin air. His approach is almost unfailingly gentle, indulgent, and tolerant of the frailties of this brittle world. In Seuss-land, all human rancor can be boiled down to the contentious standoff between two neighbors featured in My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, competing over who had the better garden.

Dr. Seuss, My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, 27 by 34 inches.

The publisher of The Art of Dr. Seuss, Robert M. Chase, notes that almost everyone has a “significant Dr. Seuss memory” and that any number of creative artists and writers acknowledge the master’s influence on their work. “Indeed,” writes Chase on the website of the same name, “what Walt Disney was to entertainment, Theodor Seuss Geisel was to art and literature.”

Dr. Seuss, Cat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, 22 by 44 inches.

The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: Look At Me! Look At Me Now! The Rare Editions Exhibition will be at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery through March 30, 2024.