A former Expressionist comes full circle

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

“Martha Armstrong: Up to Now” begins with a small self-portrait from 1963, painted in a polite Expressionist manner. Lest those unfamiliar with Armstrong’s work assume that this is her “house style,” the self-portrait is immediately followed by a number of small landscape sketches in oil. The difference is startling. Here the artist seizes onto form the way a drowning man grabs at an oar.

This isn’t to say that she’s rendering form realistically. Rather, Armstrong is abstracting it— taking the idea of the form and running with it.

Thus her 1978 painting, Railroad Ave. Trees, Haverford, takes the mere notion of the shapes of the trees, then renders them as boldly colored solids. They look almost like a row of weirdly shaped lollypops. In case you assume that the woman just can’t draw very well, a nice selection of Armstrong’s charcoal sketches accompanies her paintings— and they give the lie to that notion.

No, I think Armstrong was consciously playing with our notions of color and form, creating visual fantasias that are almost musical in their effect. Though some of the later pieces from the 1990s seem a bit tamer than those ’70s pieces, Armstrong can still produce a work like Ash Tree, Hollins, that looks almost like a 1930s fabric design.

I like the fact that the Martha Armstrong exhibition is in town at the same time as the Art Museum’s big “Cézanne and Beyond” exhibition. It’s interesting to compare the two painters’ landscapes. Cézanne’s works are executed with a more subdued palette, and Cézanne analyzes the landscape, almost dissecting it. This approach seems quite foreign to Armstrong, even in her sketches.

Rather, she seems to come away with an overall impression of what she has seen. Her oils go much further than the sketches in translating the impressions into abstract forms; and varied and vivid colors enliven her forms, so that everything resembles a form of visual music.

Cézanne’s approach seems drier, more intellectual. Armstrong’s work is clearly more emotive. So perhaps Armstrong never stopped being that young Expressionist of 1963 after all.