Davariz Broaden, One to Remember, 2023. Installation image.  Photo: PD Rearick. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co.

The rich tradition of figurative painting can be traced back to prehistoric times as a way to portray and represent the artist’s surrounding culture. Infinite stylistic choices have animated the flatness of stone, paper, fabric or canvas to render scenes of adjacent worlds, encouraging viewers to enter, observe and learn from the subjects presented. It has become clear throughout the history of art that the brush holds power in its ability to tell a story, depict current times, or propose a future world, and it is the painters who are conscious of this power that approach their practice with careful attention to detail. The five paintings on display at Louis Buhl & Co. mark a significant point in the career of the artist Davariz Broaden. As a self-taught Detroit-based painter, his professional trajectory has grown quickly since he started exploring the medium in 2021. In just a few years, Broaden’s work has been exhibited locally and nationally as he has become increasingly recognized for his contemporary depictions of Black culture as well as the nostalgia of the Black experience. “One to Remember” is Broaden’s second solo exhibition with Louis Buhl & Co., functioning not only as his official debut into the world of artist representation but also into the world of large scale painting.

Davariz Broaden, Young All Stars, 2023 Acrylic, oil, and sugar on canvas. 70 x 70 in Photo: Tim Johnson. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co.

The collection of works in the wide and shallow Buhl gallery space envelops its guests with what seem like memories of a birthday celebration or a family reunion. Their scale alone allows for relatability as the nearly six feet tall canvases illustrate life-size figures, but in addition to this mirroring of proportions, we witness this party and its nuances as a tradition familiar to so many. The sky jumps from canvas to canvas like a panoramic photograph to enhance the impression of actually being there, while the muted color palette, gentle approach to paint application and unique drawing style combine to promote sensations of movement and life.

Davariz Broaden, Youngest of 4, 2023 Acrylic and oil on canvas 60 x 48 in Photo: Tim Johnson. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co

Prior to 2021, Davariz Broaden worked in other avenues of creative production. While studying Fashion Technology at Kent State University, he expressed a desire to emphasize and foster discussion surrounding the relationship between the past, present and future. Many aspects of Broaden’s current work seem to be continuing on that path. An assessment of his paintings from the beginning until now demonstrates an informed approach to composition and subject, recalling prominent African American artists from the modern era until now. Similar to artists like Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherrald and Michalene Thomas, Broaden’s strong use of color, his contrasts between light and dark tones and his depictions of love and leisure in Black communities move the Black subject into a future where their main story is no longer of oppression but of autonomy and joy.

Davariz Broaden, Birthdays & Block Parties, 2023 Acrylic, oil, and sugar on canvas 60 x 48 in Photo: Tim Johnson. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co.

The titles of the paintings in “One To Remember” aid in keeping the mood of the show as light as a day at a park. The compositions are based on photographs of family and friends which has become an ongoing trend of Broaden and can be found in work by him that has been previously shown by Luis Buhl & Co., The Detroit Artists Market, M Contemporary in Ferndale, and a solo presentation at Future Art Fair with Medium Tings in New York City. Currently at Louis Buhl & Co., the Young All Stars are four boys wearing matching shirts posing quickly mid-motion. Birthdays & Block Parties shows a boy playing jump rope. Brothers pose with the Youngest of Four in a field with a forest of pine trees in the background. A little girl stays with her mom at the Grown Folks Table where the white styrofoam container emphasizes the mildly flattened perspective that is repeated from painting to painting within the artist’s practice. Broaden’s evolving awareness and comfort with painting has encouraged him to introduce oil to his originally all acrylic-based studio and the combination of the two seems to have even further influenced his already careful approach to textures, colors, fabrics and how they would respond to each other.

Davariz Broaden, Grown Folks Table, 2023, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Photo:Tim Johnson. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co.

A child of Gen Z (born in 1999) Davariz Broaden holds a youthful perspective of everyday subject matter in this contemporary world. This point of view is valued by the curatorial team at Louis Buhl & Co.  The Senior Director Alessandra Ferrara collaborated with Director Caroline Hinnant as well as JJ and Anthony Curis to introduce Broaden to professional strategies to forge and build a successful career as an artist, starting with inviting him to produce a unique series of works on paper and featuring him as an artist in their Salon Highlight initiative. Broaden is now represented by the gallery, who works with him as consultants as well as advocates and exhibitors of his work.

Davariz Broaden, Summer, 2023, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 70 x 70 in. Photo:PD Rearick. Courtesy of Artist and Louis Buhl & Co.

“One to Remember” by Davariz Broaden opened on July 8, 2023 at Louis Buhl & Co. and is on view until September 6, 2023.

Learn more about Louis Buhl & Co here: https://www.louisbuhl.com/

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris,  1918 – 1948, at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Cubism wasn’t born of a manifesto (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque tended to leave the blah-blah to others), but Cubism’s outsized influence inspired the spilling of much ink, as artists and critics sought to explain it, support it, modify it or, inevitably and however prematurely, proclaim its demise. In the week of the armistice that ended World War One, artists Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (aka, Le Corbusier) penned Aprés le Cubisme, announcing the supplanting of the old style with what they dubbed Purism, an attempt at bringing order to the fractured post-war world, and to the jumble of the art world in particular — a world whose undisputed capital was Paris.

Café, Paris, 1929 Archibald John Motley, Jr., American, 1891 – 1981 Oil on canvas

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris 1918-1948, the Detroit Institute of Arts’ current exhibit of graphic works from its collection, borrows it’s name from the Purist manifesto but sets its scene with the sole painting in the show, a recent-ish acquisition by Archibald Motley from 1929, Café, Paris, which depicts an archetypical scene of a Montmartre watering hole populated by various bohemian types. A Black American painter, Motley was one ingredient in the multicultural stew of artists that populated the City of Light between the wars. He’s joined in this exhibit by, among others, Mexico’s Diego Rivera, seen here breaking away from his own version of Cubism with still lifes that suggest the more naturalistic style he’d eventually bring to the DIA’s Detroit Industry murals; Lithuanian-born Jacques Lipchitz, one of a few artists here who kept some version of Cubism alive despite reports of its passing; and the Jewish Russian Marc Chagall, whose etching L’Apparition, a scene of a winged muse descending upon a self-portrait of the painter at his easel, is a secular Annunciation. Also here is Tsugouharu Foujita, whose delicate line drawing Head of a Girl is both modern and reflective of the graphic traditions of his native Japan. The drawing pairs nicely with the small watercolor portrait of A Young Girlby Marie Laurencin, the only painter among the women artists in the show; the others are all photographers: Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Fehr, Dora Maar, and the German-American Ilsa Bing, “queen of the Leica,” who contributes several intriguing compositions. The genderfluid Claude Cahun is represented by a riveting self-portrait as well.

Self Portrait with Leica, 1931, printed 1992 Ilse Bing, American, 1899 – 1998 Gelatin silver print

Self-Portrait, ca. 1927 Claude Cahun, French, 1894-1954 Gelatin silver print

Dominating one wall of the exhibition’s first room is a color mock-up for a mural by Raoul Dufy, a project called The Spirit of Electricity, created for display at the 1937 World’s Fair (and now in the Museum of the City of Paris). Gifted to the DIA in 1999, the large color sketch has some resonance with the Rivera Industry murals; turbines, trains, and other modern marvels are depicted, though Dufy is apparently less interested in the technology of electricity, which he associates with the power of Zeus and other mythological figures, and more fascinated by the “Great Men” of science and history, who throng the bottom of the image. The panels are brightly colored and loosely painted. Compare this with the more muscular, more populist, and tech-savvy vision of Rivera — which may be just to say that artists’ approaches to modernity in these years were varied and often contrasting.

The Spirit of Electricity, 1936/1937 Raoul Dufy, French, 1877-1953 Watercolor, gouache on paper mounted on canvas

Inevitably, perhaps, Picasso becomes at least one of the exhibit’s through lines, his position as the guy to beat implied by the title, his status as a successful giant of the art scene suggested in a photo by Man Ray in which he regards the viewer coolly from behind a respectable suit and cardigan. His decidedly non-cubist pencil drawing from 1920 of a nude bather sitting on a beach, the horizon balanced on her head, is one of the first works in the show; his late-1945 print Head of a Young Boy is one of the show’s final images. Picasso was one of the first to explore what lay beyond Cubism, and he’s shown here returning to classical sources for inspiration, as in his suite of illustrations for Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu— The Unknown Masterpiece, a short story by Balzac about an obsessed artist whose ten-year attempt to paint a portrait of his beloved results only in an undecipherable mess. Picasso’s most direct illustration of the story, showing the placid model knitting on the left, the artist absorbed in his work on the right, and the canvas in between choked by a tangle of arcs and lines, could pass for a wry New Yorker cartoon on the state of modern art. (Picasso related so strongly to the story that he moved his studio to the same Paris neighborhood in which Balzac’s fictional painter worked.) Picasso’s line work throughout the illustrations is in fact clear and simple, evoking classical sculpture, except when he strategically applies intense hatching to emphasize a particular section of the image.

The complete set of Balzac illustrations is displayed in one of the gallery’s two octagonal side rooms. The other contains another set of illustrations, these by Louis Marcoussis, one of Cubism’s hold-outs, for a text by Gérard de Nerval, the Romantic writer whose dreamy work presaged the concerns of Surrealism. The Surrealists of course took the opposite tack from the return-to-order crowd, deciding after WW1 that irrationality and madness were more relevant to the current age than reason. The movement is represented here by the experimental photographs of Man Ray and others, as well as copies of the lavishly produced journals Minotaure and Verve; the final edition of the latter, the “war issue,” features a defiant Gallic rooster by Joan Miró, the last image to appear in the journal before it closed due to the encroachment of the Nazis.

Elsewhere in the exhibit is Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, a savage lampooning of the Spanish dictator whom Picasso depicts as some kind of anthropomorphic tumor, running roughshod through a series of grotesque misadventures. It’s one of his best-known graphic works, but when you’re mounting a concise survey of thirty of the most storied years in art history, it’s not a bad idea to “play the hits” here and there. Matisse, for example, is well represented by his popular pochoir portfolio called Jazz, derived from the colorful paper cut-outs he created late in his life. Bedridden by illness while his country was being overrun by fascists, Matisse summoned happier memories of the circus and a trip to Tahiti to use as subject matter, but it was his publisher that gave the collection its musical title, to suggest the spirit of improvisation behind the work. The images are likely familiar to many art fans thanks to decades of posters and other inexpensive reproductions, but they definitely merit seeing in their original vibrant colors, and their lyrical compositions deserve a closer look.

Le cirque, 1943 Henri Matisse, French, 1869-1954 Tériade, Greek, 1897 – 1983 Edmond Vairel, French Pochoir printed in color ink on wove paper

Other “greatest hits” on display here that will delight devotees of the between-the-wars art scene include Cartier-Bresson’s clever photo Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, of a man leaping gingerly over a reflective layer of water on the pavement and Brassaï’s portrait of Bijou, a fading, bejeweled Belle Epoch matron ensconced in some bar in Montmartre who seems to be incapable of finding a path into the future.

“Bijou” of Montmartre, ca. 1932 Brassaï, French, 1899-1984 Gelatin silver print

The path forward for many of the artists in this exhibit included nerve-wracking waits for exit visas, cross-Atlantic escapes, struggles alongside Resistance forces, and interment in concentration camps (or, as with Le Corbusier, collaboration with fascists). While it’s not quite the final image in the exhibit (that’s Bing’s photo of the Eiffel Tower, still standing through everything), maybe Picasso’s doe-eyed child in Head of a Boy, printed only a few months after the end of the war, is a good note to go out on — a fresh-faced hope for a new start after the horrors of the Second World War, from an artist whose post-war work would be so preoccupied with the image of the dove.

After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris,  1918 – 1948, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2023

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Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence  @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

Installation image out front of Gallery. All images courtesy of Simone De Sousa Gallery

Former Fiber Artists-in-Residence, Mark Newport (2007-2023) and Jane Lackey (1997-2007), who served long tenures at Cranbrook Academy of Art, have reunited in a two-person exhibition at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit. Though both have developed singular practices and careers, their show, self-titled Correspondence, showcases underlying similarities in their art-making processes. Indeed, despite their physical distance from one another–Newport works in the Detroit area while Lackey has resided in New Mexico since 2009–they remain in touch and together initiated the exhibition concept.

Installation view of Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence

At first glance, observing their art on opposite walls in the main gallery, one might think the two clusters of art represent antithetical points of view and execution. Newport’s robust stitchery versus Lackey’s inclination to highlight the process of flowing; his darkling monochromatic palette, her startling cobalt blues; his army blanket supports, her meticulously hand-drawn grids on paper; his gnarly surfaces, her neat, calm meshes; his irregularly shaped compositions, her Spartan rectangles.

Yet correspondences, as Newport and Lackey remind us, emerge upon further viewing: their vertical compositions convey a kind of order and classical uniformity; asymmetric shapes and forms enliven and colorize the pictorial spaces; both employ open ended, ad hoc creative techniques; and repetitive titles emphasize the seriously serial explorations of mending and flowing, the common but enthralling modus operandi of these two makers.

Mark Newport, Mend 21, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 40 x 28 in., 2021. Photo: George P. Perez

Mend 21 (2021), a prime example of one of Newport’s ongoing Mending series, began, like most, with a cut into the wool army blanket material, indicative of the inevitable tears and abrasions in a fabric used to warm and protect a vulnerable body. The subsequent mending of the cut, via darning and embroidery, leaves a physical reminder of the repair or “scab,” as per the artist.  Executed with thick or thin thread, the circular or rectangular halos surrounding these wounds add subtle color and texture to the gray wool ground of the blanket.

Mark Newport, Swathe, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 83 x 59 in., 2023. Photo: George P. Perez

Swathe (2023), the largest and one of the latest Newport works on view, is boldly and brazenly colorful, sporting three swaths of yellow at the left, a squiggly yellow line above, green, black, and brown horizontal stitching within two amoebic forms near the top, plus an organic oozing of multicolor hues at mid-center countered by a punchy red and black plaid patch at lower right. Moreover, the scrunched and bunched ball of fabric right of center heightens tactility and tautens Swathe’s irregular shape.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 3, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Lackey’s Almost being said, flow 3 (2022), one of her identically titled drawings (with numerical designations), establishes the format for a quartet of spare, asymmetric arrangements of flowing cobalt forms encroaching upon precisely drawn paper grids. Like Newport, she too begins with consistent support, his an army blanket, hers a grid, that each artist then disrupts or interrupts. Here, in flow 3, two cobalt forms appear to be advancing toward the center, one on the left edging in slowly, the other at the upper right moving (hurtling?) comet-like toward the center. As Lackey’s lyrical titles imply, something undefined is being said, thought or felt, but provocatively, what that is, is only “almost” laid bare.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 4, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Similarly, in Almost being said, flow 4 (2022), the slowly descending blue form appears to be on the verge of enveloping the tight, orderly grid. The tempo varies from composition to composition, evoking states of mind, emotional ups and downs, shifting moods and, as Lackey observes, “assertions of self within a plaid of connective tissue.”

Hence, Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Together and apart, singular but connected, Midwesterner and Southwesterner, two makers linked across the miles via stitching and flowing. Correspondence, not competition, as they’ve confirmed, is the order of the day.

Correspondence is on view at Simone DeSousa Gallery, 444 W. Willis St., Detroit, MI, through August 12, 2023.

Untouched by Time – for the American painter Thomas Parish

Installation, the image of the artist, Tom Parish (June 11, 1933 – October 25, 2018), 2019, all images courtesy of DAR

He was born in Hibbing, Minnesota 1933, where blistering winters kept the young boy inside his home, coloring the pages from a Sears & Roebuck catalog. When he was four, his mother married Ken Parish, and the family moved to Chicago. He attended a public grade school where he was recognized for his art and later attended a military high school providing a small studio space. There he made paintings that were purchased by many of his teachers. During this period, he repeatedly visited the Chicago Art Institute and was excited by the work of Joseph Cornell, J.M.W. Turner, El Greco, Jean Baptiste Corot, and Edward Hopper. He often said, “My father wanted a better and more highly recognized school experience for his son.”

Upon graduation from high school, Parish’s mother helped him apply to William & Mary College, a prestigious liberal arts school in Williamsburg, Virginia. Still, it was a short time before his teachers, based on his artistic talent, recommended that he transfer to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art with its famous museum. Well known for its academic approach to painting, the teachers taught the highly traditional skills of life drawing and painting. He recalled opening an exhibition that included Franklin Watkins, Morris Blackburn, Hobson Pittman, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning. In addition, the permanent collection housed in the oldest college museum in the country had many masterpieces by William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer, and former Academy students Robert Henri and John Sloan.

It would shape Parish’s painting in a way that would soon be discovered.

Tom Parish, Pink Sky, 36 x 24″, Oil on canvas, 2000.

Parish’s graduate degree led him to two years of teaching in North Dakota and a community college teaching position at Forest Park that lasted three years. The offer of a teaching assistantship at the University of North Dakota led him to the art department there, headed by Bob Nelson, who had trained at the Chicago Art Institute and had figurative work at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art. He made several friends who taught nearby at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, with a distinguished faculty, such as Josef Albers and Max Beckman, and again, a rich collection at the museum.

Along the way, the literary influences that he sought out would shape his thinking about painting.  He would say, “An early influence was Cezanne’s Composition: Analysis of Form, by Erle Loran, which helped provide a framework for looking at composition, along with The Story of Art, by E.H. Gombrich, a widely regarded book of art criticism.”  It was his reading of Albert Pinkham Ryder, an American painter, whose descriptions of these moody seascapes, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge, a poem inspired by New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, that pushed Parish towards landscape painting, albeit surreal and aerial images of objects and buildings.

All along the way, these constant visits to world-class museums and a new type of jazz music during the mid-1950s filtered into Parish’s view of the world. He eventually created a unique island called Zarna, a place from his childhood filled with imaginative landscapes.  These aerial images produced with minor marks of  paint often included train tracks, rooftops, and geometric objects, each with a light source casting shadows to the side.

There came a time in the mid-1960s when an Assistant Professor position at Wayne State University opened up. During a visit to Chicago, Robert Wilbert, the then Chair of Painting, was impressed with the work of Tom Parish. Mack Gilman of the Gilman Gallery said, “Parish is among the best of six living painters in the world.”  Wilbert had found what he was looking for and knew with Parish on board; he would have a good team. At that very moment, Parish was on his way to teach at L’Ecole des Arts in Winnipeg, Canada, when he got a call from Wilbert and was offered an Assistant Professor position on a tenure track to teach painting in Detroit. Located in midtown across from the Detroit Institute of Arts, with one of the most significant art collections in the United States, Parish had found a place to teach and paint near a world-class museum.

Parish had found gallery representation in Chicago with Mac Gilman in the 1960s, where he exhibited his Zarna-based surreal landscapes comprised of a compact field of stones, producing a color field. The work attracted the attention of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City, specializing in American painting. Parish participated in three exhibitions at the Martha Jackson Gallery in the early 1970s after David Andersen (Martha Jackson’s son) had seen his work in San Francisco. 1980 Parish resumed the relationship with the Gilman Gallery. This was to become the Gilman Gruen Gallery and eventually the Gruen Gallery. There would be ten years of exhibition in Chicago, and by this time, Parish had solidified his reputation for painting in the Chicago and Detroit art communities.

By then, Parish was searching for a direction to take the work until a visit to Europe and Venice in 1986 provided him with a replacement for the Zarna imagery. The canals, corners, terraces, and undulating water shimmering with elongated light satisfied his love for landscape painting. It was an ‘Old World’ atmosphere with the architectural form and mystical light that seemed to draw him into a significant compositional transition.

He needed to keep his teaching position and his studio in Detroit, so he and his wife, Shirley, began to plan extended trips to Venice, sometimes twice or three times a year, spanning the last thirty years. The time in Venice was spent on observation and capturing images photographically during a two-, sometimes three-week stay. The photos were both in spirit and part informational in creating what I have called magical realism, using a literary term. The early work would include a Vaporetto, water taxi, or gondola and be always set against a salty, worn section of architecture and elongated reflections flight on water. The underlying strength is always compositional. Parish returned to everything he had experienced in his reading to his observations of Cezanne, combined with a lucid imagination to form special longitudes of form and gentle reflections of light.

Tom Parish, Sogo Dream, 55 x 75″, 2016

Parish’s work, like Sogno Dream, 55 x 75-inch Oil on Canvas, combines his strengths: a composition that stretches out spatially and draws on elements in abstraction and his command of painting in the reflection-struck water in the turbulent canal. The viewer is drawn into the water’s texture above and below the water’s surface.  Venice, Italy’s famous artists Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgio e, Titian, Palo Veronese, and Tintoretto have left their mark primarily by painting religious allegories. Parish focused on architecture and light.

Tom Parish, San Marco, 61 x 85″, 2014

Writers succumbed to the city’s unique charm, vitality, and decadence including Goethe, Herman Hesse, and John Ruskin. Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955), the Nobel Prize winner in literature, was fascinated by Venice and used it as a setting for one of his most famous novels. He writes the following in 1912 in “Death in Venice”: “Yes, this was Venice, this the fair frailty that fawned and that betrayed half fairy-tale, half star; the city in whose stagnating air the art of painting once put forth so lusty a growth, and where musicians were moved to accords so weirdly lulling and lascivious.”

It took an American painter, Thomas Parish, from Hibbing, Minnesota, home to the musician Bob Dylan, to find the landscape in Venice, part of the shallow Venetian lagoon and an enclosed bay between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers. His Venetian landscapes expose the beauty of the architectural setting and swirls of reflective water that transcend a soft blend of magnitude and mystery.  The memorial exhibition, Untouched by Time, was curated by Dalia Reyes, Gallery Director at the Scarab Club, with assistance from Shirley Dombrowski Parish.

Untouched by Time, Tom Parish, Scarab Club, open until June 17 – 2023.