Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Arnold Mesches
American (b. 1923)
ANNA MESCHES I (1974)
acrylic on canvas
66” x 60”

STYLE: PHOTOREALISM

  

Born in the Bronx, Arnold Mesches studied at the Art Center in Pasadena, and has been painting since the forties. From 1945 to 1972, he was under surveillance by the F.B.I. as a suspected communist (Mesches was active in the labor movement and other leftist causes). Although actively exhibiting and teaching his entire career, Mesches did not achieve significant recognition in the art world until the eighties, with his strongly expressive series of paintings combining human history and art history. In addition to these references, Mesches has also included images and icons familiar to him from his childhood in New York.

Although the artist has always practiced realistic depiction, and generally uses photography as source material, his portraits of the seventies veer closest to the photorealist style. Anna I is a portrait of Mesches’ mother and is one of a long series of portraits the artist made of her during the last thirty years or so of her life.

Arnold Mesches has had numerous one-person and group exhibitions, including one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Neuberger Museum, State University of New York in Purchase, New York; the Visual Arts Center at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina; and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work is in several museums and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and the National Gallery of Art, both in Washington, DC; and the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums. He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Richard Florsheim Art Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Robert Pincus, San Diego Tribune, 11/02/02
" Mesches came into his own as an artist in Los Angeles, during the '40s and '50s, when Figurative Expressionism, politically tinged art and Abstract-Expressionism dominated the scene. He earned considerable respect for his socially critical paintings, as well as for his portraits. For the last 18 years, he's lived and worked in New York, exhibiting as frequently outside Manhattan as in it.
The century Mesches paints in this exhibition is the 20th, both in terms of familial history and larger events. It's a subjective, fragmented look at the past, but why should we expect otherwise? After all, he's an artist, not a historian.
His mother's portrait is an apt opening emblem for the exhibition. Anna Mesches lived through much of the century on which he focuses (she died in 1996, at age 97) and he has returned to her repeatedly as a subject.
... ‘I have been imbued since childhood with a fierce sense of indignant righteousness,’ explains the artist in one catalog essay. That view comes across in a painting such as "Coney." So does a strong humanistic temperament, particularly evident in his portrait of his mother. The undercurrent of love that emanates from this painting is a testament to Mesches' belief that art is a bracing rejoinder to the ugly and dehumanizing aspects of life."

Eleanor Heartney, Art in America, 2/02
"...unlike many other artists of his generation, he has remained committed to figuration throughout his long and productive career. One suspects that this allegiance to representational imagery derives, in part, from his response to the horrors of World War II, which Mesches followed from afar as a Jewish boy in a family only recently escaped from the pogroms of the Old World. In one of several eloquent texts he contributed to the exhibition's catalogue, Mesches notes that in the aftermath of the war, he resolved to become the Jewish Goya of the 20th century: "I wanted to try to attack war and the makers of war with the intensity of Francisco Goya's unsparing etchings and his probing portraits.... I wanted my art to move people, as good art should.
... In contrast, a set of works inspired by Mesches's mother is more private. The centerpiece of this section of the show was a series of portraits he painted over the last two and a half decades of his mother's life. Their styles vary considerably. The oldest work, from 1974, is almost Photo-Realist in its penetrating detail, turning Anna Mesches's wrinkled face into a craggy landscape. In 1980, she has become a welter of expressionist brushstrokes. In 1995, Mesches captures her with a troubled expression, half lost in a blue-black darkness with a single spot of red on her glasses."