Carol Adelman: “House of Mirth”

by Matthew Kangas

Meloy Gallery, Bellingham, Washington

Exhibition continues through September 1, 2024

August 10, 2024

Carol Adelman, “Self-Portrait with Dolls,” 2016, oil on panel, 20 x 16”.

All images courtesy of Meloy Gallery, Bellingham, WA

It is a stretch to explain the connected narratives of Carol Adelman’s mostly small oil paintings, here dating from 2004 to the present. The title of the show, “House of Mirth,” borrows that of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel. It could be that, like Lily Bart, Wharton’s heroine ultimately brought down by her prior social climbing, Adelman is making an oblique attempt to explain her almost decade-long break from exhibiting. She was still painting, but she had to work through personal health issues, not Wharton-style social ambition.

Carol Adelman, “Girls Life,” 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 18”.

Adelman was educated in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University. She has taught at Dickinson College, Louisiana State University, and University of Washington where she was a Stout Fellow and obtained her MFA there in 1997. Before teaching stints, she was also on the staff at “Museum & Arts” magazine in Washington, D.C. and worked in the education department at The Phillips Collection. Countless hours observing the Old Masters at the National Gallery of Art proved a crucial influence. Additionally, as a native New Yorker, she spent her childhood and teenage years visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In short, Adelman’s image bank was a readymade cultural asset, hers to assimilate, transform and distort to her own subjective ends. The results are complicated but compelling paintings that present clusters of images masquerading as classical iconographies that serve as surrogates of the artist’s imaginative tropes: psychological growth; environmental crisis; and the instability of optical perception controlling our view of the world.

Adelman’s paintings require intense scrutiny to unravel the layered imagery. Her painting style does not really resemble anyone else’s (except the late June Leaf) yet it draws on fragmentary art historical sources from Watteau, Goya, Titian, Velázquez, van Eyck and others. As one critic put it, she posits “an unresolvable negotiation between internal and external worlds in relation to historical conventions of representation.”

Carol Adelman, “Me and the Mountain,” 2009, oil on panel, 20 x 16”.

Given such a daunting compilation of intentions, the paintings are remarkably entertaining, even comic, despite their often ominous or foreboding implications. For example, the ubiquitous dolls that appear and reappear in her pictures echo Belgian Symbolist James Ensor, with their smudgy execution and gleeful, glaring facial expressions. “Self-Portrait with Dolls” (2016) explicitly echoes Ensor’s “Self-Portrait with Masks” (1899), but uses toys as mask-surrogates that surround two mirror reflections of the artist. Preposterously, a pig routs an open drawer with pink silk remnants. A black-face doll stuffed into a blue vase struggles to avoid “drowning.” Hovering above them all, another doll doubles as an angel, hands extended in blessing. Her solemn expression contrasts with the inane, fixed faces of the other dolls.

“Me and the Mountain” (2000) backgrounds Cézanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire” obsession to set off two dolls in ridiculously lacy Southern belle outfits, one in billowing pantaloons, the other, shorter doll in white plantation attire. The artist’s time in Washington left her with an awareness of racial injustice on which to comment.

Carol Adelman, “The Truth about Ms. Piggy,” 2004, oil on panel, 24 x 18”.

Adelman sets each painting up to be read as an open-ended narrative to comic or crisis climaxes. “The Truth about Miss Piggy” (2005) sets up the Muppet character as a participant in a cascade of dolls about to collapse above a two-part teapot crushing the porcine TV icon. Nearby, metal cowboy toys and a sprouting sweet potato complete an absurdist still life composition. “Girl’s Life” (2016) sets three dolls on metal struts against a boy in a checked suit, rigidly constructed as a faux-family unit. The image is a symbolic parallel to other Southern tales, such as Lillian Hellman’s 1960 play “Toys in the Attic,” in which two unhappy sisters in New Orleans sacrifice everything to take care of their profligate younger brother.

Carol Adelman, “House of Mirth,” 2024, oil on canvas, 50 x 46”.

The centerpiece and eponymous work, “House of Mirth” (2010/2024), encapsulates the artist’s unique conglomeration of autobiography, literature, and art history. Two female figures, one reclining and the other resting her feet in a tub of water, reference van Eyck’s “Madonna of Chancellor Rolin” (c. 1435), replete with arched windows and hovering angels joined by a suspended pig. In Adelman’s hands, the Old Master picture is topsy-turvy, fair game for a wacky puzzle of shapes and symbols, all the better to enjoy deciphering and to simply behold its rich painterly execution and impeccable composition.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas