Tucson Weekly: Broad Strokes (March 19

Broad Strokes

A Trio Of Gallery Shows Canvasses Tucson's Early Masters And Contemporary Talents.
By Margaret Regan
IT'S A PERSISTENT mystery, but the fact is that Ted DeGrazia, known now and forever for kitschy paintings of cute Indians, once claimed the attention of the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.
A show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art at last solves the mystery. Tucson's Early Moderns, 1945-1965, an engrossing exploration of the work of the first Old Pueblo artists to deviate from the tourist aesthetic, opens with some early, unfamiliar paintings by DeGrazia. Born in Morenci, DeGrazia was the son of an Italian immigrant who worked the copper mines. The son began his art career armed with a political consciousness. "Defeat," a 1940 oil on canvas, depicts two Mexican soldiers carrying off a peasant woman. An undated triptych called "Mining" looks like a study for a pro-worker mural in the grand Rivera style: At its center is a heroic miner in a hardhat; at his sides are massive industrial metalworks, rising out of fire, shooting off sparks. Here was interesting subject matter, given a flat, modernist treatment, by a son of the working class. No wonder the Mexicans were intrigued.
Review The exhibition, curated by longtime Tucson ceramist Maurice Grossman, doesn't clue us in to the bigger mystery of why an artist of DeGrazia's promise evolved in such a disappointing direction. Its 63 artworks, nevertheless, introduce a late '90s audience to the big names in the city's contemporary art scene a half-century ago. Grossman, who arrived in 1955 to teach at the tiny University of Arizona art department, found a flourishing modernist art scene, an upstart counterpoint to the popular regional crafts and tourist knockoffs.
Much of the artwork looks dated to contemporary eyes--the colors of the '40s and '50s paintings are surprisingly subdued, considering their desert origins--but they demonstrate a brisk familiarity with expressionism, figurative and abstract, cubism and the like. Harold Friedly's "Fragments of a City," 1955-'56, is a deft abstraction of a town below mountains. John Maul, a Tucson Citizen arts reporter, painted the elegant "Laughter in New Mexico" in 1952; it's an oil in delicate shades of pink, divided geometrically into arches and squares and triangles.
Artists like the Berlin-trained Friedly were part of a flood of newcomers who quadrupled the population of the city during the 1940s, pushing it from 36,000 in the late '30s to 127,000 in the late '40s. The Air Force base brought some during the war, while the climate's healthy benefits drew others. The university, swelling with ex-soldiers studying under the GI bill, hired some artists as profs. Trained in the big art centers of New York and Chicago, the newcomers slowly introduced the locals to modernism. Not without resistance, of course. Among the many clippings displayed in the show is an angry letter to the editor of The Arizona Daily Star denouncing an editorial that had evidently disparaged abstraction.
Not all of the modernists were abstract painters. In fact, one of the show's most interesting paintings, "And Now Tomorrow," is an austere piece of realism. Painted in 1949 by UA prof James Powell Scott (1909-1982), who had trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, it's an oil on canvas that recalls Edward Hopper's gloomy portrayals of American alienation. All gray and brown, it pictures four men at the edge of a precipice, uneasily looking out into a vast emptiness. A Tucson resident immediately conjectures that the bleak metaphorical setting is a Mount Lemmon overlook.
A lively young woman by the name of Mac (Mary Alice) Schweitzer (1924-1962) found a more joyful inspiration in the local landscape. A student at the Cleveland Art Institute, she once declared that she "never painted anything worthwhile" until she moved to Tucson, in 1947. Schweitzer was enchanted by the strange desert vegetation ("Fallen Giant" is an energetic rendition of a saguaro in a limited palette of golds and browns) and the exotic people ("Diné Sing Till Dawn," 1952, captures a Navajo ceremony). It's hard to see these familiar subjects today with unjaded eyes, but Schweitzer's unusual palette and paint, layered and scratched out, set her apart from the tourist painters. And she got there before they became set in cliché.
As the show moves into the '60s, the paintings begin to look familiar. They're looser and more colorful, more like contemporary Tucson painting. Charles Littler, a UA prof and founder of Rancho Linda Vista, brings a sea of change to desert painting, with his vivid palette, simplified composition and wild brush strokes. "Desert 1," 1960, is all blue and green and black and infused with intense light.
Tucson's Early Moderns traces some lines of continuity between past and present. The old Tucson Fine Arts Association evolved into the Tucson Museum of Art, the UA Art Gallery became the UA Museum of Art, the UA art department has only increased its influence on the local arts community. Yet most of the galleries and studios that Grossman so fondly remembers--Rosequist downtown, Ruby Newby's Gallery 261 and vibrant Ash Alley in El Presidio--were leveled by the wrecking ball during the black days of urban renewal. It was years before anyone could again speak of a Tucson arts district.
A couple of other exhibitions right now around town show that painting nevertheless is still alive and well locally. Nancy Tokar Miller, one of the city's best painters, is showing a new suite of works on paper and canvas at Etherton. Miller has a fluid, almost liquid way with her acrylics and oils, and her colors seem to flow onto her surfaces almost without any intervention on the artist's part. The current landscape paintings are inspired once again by her Far Eastern journeys: Their sweeps of blues and greens, interrupted by shots of red, have all the deceptive simplicity of Asian painting.
Another local painter, Farzad Nakhai, conversely is an Iranian native who's been transfixed by the topography of Arizona, his adopted home. Now at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, his watercolors, acrylics and oils place him firmly in the long line of artists who have come to Tucson and fallen in love with the desert. His bright greens, blues and yellows, dancing across his surfaces in joyful splashes of paint, celebrate the desert's every season, and the light's every mood.
Tucson's Early Moderns, 1945-1965 continues through April 1 at the UA Museum of Art, Park Avenue and Speedway. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 621-7567.
A show of paintings by Nancy Tokar Miller, with glass art by Preston Singletary and Benjamin Moore, continues through March 28 at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Thursdays and 7 to 10 p.m. Downtown Saturday Nights. For more information call 624-7370.
Paintings by Farzad Nakhai and photos by Ben Golden are on display through March 26 at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, Dodge Boulevard and River Road. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Sunday. For more information call 299-3000.

Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives