steven harvey fine art projects presents Jupiter and Antiope, an exhibition of Lennart Anderson’s interpretations of Greek myth.
Lennart Anderson (1928-2015) was described by the New York Times as one of the most “prominent and admired painters to translate figurative art into a modern idiom.” Born in Detroit, Michigan, Anderson studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Academy and briefly with Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League. He taught art at Columbia, Princeton and Yale, and was a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College from 1974 to 2004.
A student of art history, Anderson embodies the exquisitely described values in observational painting, citing the influence of figures such as Piero della Francesca, Diego Velasquez, Edgar Degas and Claude Poussin. The motif at the center of this exhibition reveals these influences; the image of Jupiter (Zeus) and Antiope is a well-used subject, a tradition which Anderson both emulates and complicates in his re-workings of the scene. In historical depictions of the pairing, Antiope lounges asleep across the foreground, nude or draped in revealing swathes of fabric while Jupiter is a lurking, animalistic presence peering around trees or poised over the unconscious woman. Anderson’s interpretation, however, places Jupiter lying in repose opposite of Antiope in the frame. He is some distance away, his steady gaze hinting at the potential for violence but not yet enacting it.
Anderson has said that he paints “how things fall together and separate out.” The figures in this staging are simultaneously drawn together and held apart, a dynamic tension that invokes the relationship between painter and model with Jupiter as stand-in for the artist and Antiope as his subject. This series of paintings and drawings references not only the history of a particular motif, but also the history of the figure model and female nude in European painting.
Lennart Anderson is the recipient of the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, the Whitney, Fralin Art Museum, Palmer Museum of Art and the Delaware Art Museum. This is Anderson’s first solo exhibition at SHFAP.
