Curated by Margie Maynard, this retrospective exhibition examines the totality of M. Louise Stanley’s five-decade career, featuring forty-one paintings executed in watercolor, acrylic, and gouache. These are supported by additional objects and a plentiful array of sketchbooks and other ephemera revealing fascinating details about the artist’s studio processes. Stanley’s work has always been unabashedly narrative, reaching back to a time when visual storytelling had not yet come back into fashion. For many people, figurative painting in the San Francisco Bay Area still refers to thickly painted depictions of enigmatic figures executed in a spontaneous style derived from Abstract Expressionism. But Stanley’s work partakes of another Funk-influenced tradition that also fits that label, featuring inventive narratives and topsy-turvy compositions executed in high-chroma color. Always, her work is in service to an extravagant irreverence, featuring humorous storytelling tinged with biting feminist satire. Frequently, her work directly addresses the corrosive gender dynamics inscribed into the art historical canon, doing so with a light touch that belies serious and occasionally grim intentions.
The exhibition opens with a quartet of brightly colored watercolors executed in the late 1970s, looking like genre scenes from an imaginary autobiography. In If the Shoe Fits (1975), we see a suave shoe salesman catering to the vanity of a flamboyantly attired female customer, the unctuous comedy of his false sincerity spilling out of the picture. Autobiographical Portrait (1978) gives us a glimpse of what would come, showing the artist hoisting a placard displaying a rebus puzzle while sitting in a classroom. This self-portrait figure was refined in subsequent works, morphing into a generic, almost androgynous character that Stanley has dubbed “the archetypal artist,” consistently attired in green capri leggings and a long-sleeve candy cane striped shirt. Crowned with red, pixie-cut hair, this figure floats Candide-like through elaborated spaces, playing and subverting gender roles amongst other befuddled figures playing culturally proscribed roles. For example, in Wounding of Chiron (1995), we see the archetypal artist standing triumphant over the prostrate body of the wise centaur while a scornful nurse looks on the scene, while in Melencolia (after Durer) (2012), she leaps into the left-hand side of the composition as if to startle the somber angels positioned at the right. Is this an annunciation painting? If so, it mocks the biblical basis of the tale by turning its story inside out. In Self Portrait in the Year 2072 (after Ensor) (1992), we see the archetypal artist as a skeleton lying on a bed near two still-burning candles, her trademark costume neatly folded on the floor. This clever pictorial detail is typical of many of Stanley’s works, which oftentimes relish the pointed inclusion of such telling anomalies.
Near the end of the 1980s, health issues made it impossible for Stanley to work in oils, so she switched to acrylic. A pivotal work reflecting this transition is A Painting of Courage (1991), showing the archetypal artist with her back turned to the viewer, anxiously contemplating a monstrous cast shadow on a tall, darkened wall drenched in Caravaggesque chiaroscuro. Soon thereafter, she began making regular trips to Italy to gain firsthand acquaintance with the cultures of the old masters. Gradually, the archetypal artist withdrew from Stanley’s mise-en-scène so that other characters could come to the fore, mostly canonical figures reimagined from the mythological anthologies used by traditional artists as source material. By the early 2000s, her attitude about art history began to change, toning down her feminist critique while highlighting a more admiring attitude about the past. Odysseus and the Sirens (2016) features a bird’s-eye view of the well-known episode from Homer’s famous epic, showing the Sirens as emerging from billowing clouds while the Ithacan mariners are pictured as tiny and feckless. Another delightfully comical painting, titled The Grand Tour (2024), shows corpulent American tourists misbehaving at Rome’s Piazza Navona (formerly Circus Agonalis). Clad in tank tops, shorts, and baseball caps, their loutish behavior is all too familiar to those who have spent time traveling in Europe. In this and other works, we can spot some of Stanley’s likely influences, including Reginald Marsh and Florine Stettheimer.
Rarely have I seen the work of any painter who has matched Stanley’s ability to make the acrylic medium look as if it were oil paint, especially in the way that she uses layered glazes to enhance complex lighting effects. This gives her work a slightly eerie undercurrent that impacts the Hogarthian comedy of her visual storytelling.
Mark Van Proyen is Associate Professor of Art and Critical Thinking at the San Francisco Art Institute.