Some Las Vegas art lovers might wonder why the Las Vegas Art Museum would stage a retrospective of a largely unheralded artist.
It turns out that Phyllis Sloane is an accomplished painter and printmaker with a long, distinguished career. At 83, she lives and shows in Santa Fe. But outside of that Western art mecca, and her hometown of Cleveland, Sloane is mostly unknown. She deserves a retrospective somewhere on the merits of her lifetime's work. If nothing else, such a show serves to acknowledge the many thousands of artists who toil through the decades in the art world's unsung provinces.
Sloane earned a degree in industrial design in 1943 from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but she left that field in 1949 to raise a family and pursue art. Her early work shows an affinity for the approaches of the day, from the imaginary mechanical construction of the painting "Airplane Wing" (1943) to several subtle abstract paintings of the 1950s.
But eventually, she abandoned abstraction for figurative work encompassing three main interests: intimate still lifes; enigmatic portraits; and moody, lifeless cityscapes. These include acrylics and watercolors, as well as series of woodcuts and etchings.
The woodcuts—actually corkcuts—are the least successful. But her etchings are every bit as refined as the corkcuts are not. These mostly are nude female figures, depicted with rich frankness and delicacy. The rest of the work is hung without regard to chronology or theme, frustrating any attempt to gauge progression.
In her still lifes, Sloane rarely offers any clues about boundaries, and so angles of perception can be tantalizingly ambiguous. They are crisply defined and executed, mostly in watercolor, often with postcards of paintings by famous artists in the mix of objects. Sometimes she will include other images within the images, such as the sketchbook in "Homage to Modigliani" (1984), depicting objects set near it. Thus the paintings become layered studies in the business of seeing.
Her figures have a mysterious air, peopled largely by women with affectless faces in varied interiors. The acrylic "Morning Coffee" (1982) views from above a woman seated at a table, whose edge partly bisects the picture plane. A plate of oranges counterpoints the rich aquas of her attire. She reaches for her cup while perusing a newspaper opened to a two-page spread of menswear ads. You can't help imagining the men, and not the clothes, as her objects of study.
The cityscapes are desolate, but lack the depth of the portraits and still lifes. All three genres, however, allow Sloane to examine abstract principles of composition. You wonder what Sloane might have produced had she remained an abstractionist.
But you sense, if she had, she would not have been given a retrospective at the LVAM. One text panel applauds her having remained "resolutely figural" as the "late- and postmodern movements within the deconstructive complex of pop, minimalism, conceptualism, installation, performance and earth art have come and gone."
Hard to say what this dismissive swipe means. Artists still work in each of those categories. And for that matter, the Renaissance has come and gone. It suggests curator James Mann, and LVAM, have renounced the last half-century's art history to value figuration. That's not a good sign.