John Alexander @ the Smithsonian American Art Museum
From Hieronymus Bosch to Asher B. Durand to John James Audubon, the influences inherent in John Alexander’s work are clear. His paintings and drawings run the gamut from landscapes to abstractions, making for a diverse and extraordinary exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. John Alexander: A Retrospective, with 40 paintings and 27 works on paper, opens today and runs through March 16.
Alexander explores politics and religion in many of his works, infusing them with satire and humor. His compositions have a Southern consciousness – Alexander is from Texas, and events like the Selma riots affected him deeply. KKK imagery and swastikas are present in some of his drawings.
Alexander’s works need to be seen in person to be appreciated. There are often images lurking in the background — eyes, skulls, owls — that don’t really stand out in pictures of the paintings, so they’re best understood when seen first-hand. Many of the compositions seem to connect and overlap with each other, making the whole exhibit a conversation between works.
You really don’t know what you’ll find next at the show — studies of fish are like something out of a text book, massive abstract canvases like I’ve Been Living in a Hydrogen Bomb, and gorgeous, brightly colored pictures like Melon Fields, look as though they could be by three different artists, yet underlying all of them is Alexander’s keen insight into the world.
Alexander has been involved in the New York art scene since the late 1970s, and the move there from Houston is marked by a change in his paintings. He painted I’ve Been Living in a Hydrogen Bomb in 1979 as a result of this move, saying on the wall label, “[It] is an accurate reflection of how highly charged my life was when I painted it… I changed jobs, locations, and lifestyles all at one time. The trauma associated with all this upheaval took a tremendous toll. Out of that came the largest and most challenging panting I had ever attempted. I guess it was a form of exorcism that kept me from becoming an ax murderer.” The pen, brush and ink, and watercolor version of the large-scale Hydrogen Bomb, which is owned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is also on display.
Birds and masked figures are present in many paintings and lend an ominous note to even the brightest pieces, like Melon Fields, with its lone crow at the bottom of an explosion of pink and green. As Alexander explains on the wall label for Man with Two Lives, “If you want to do a symbol of opulence and greed, you do it more universal. That’s why I put the mask on my subjects — I don’t want people to know who they are… You bring your own life experiences to the images. Then you can get behind the mask.”
Alexander also paints landscapes, which correspond nicely to another exhibit at the American Art Museum — Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape is a show about the work of the Hudson River School painter. Durand painted sweeping vistas and detailed nature scenes in the 19th century, and some of Alexander’s paintings are similar.
The exhibit is the first retrospective of Alexander’s three-decade career, and the American Art Museum is the inaugural venue for the show. He will be at the museum on January 26 at 3 p.m. for a public conversation with chief curator Eleanor Harvey.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is located in the Reynolds Center at 8th and F Streets, NW. The Center is open daily from 11:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
John Alexander, Ship of Fools, 2006–2007
Oil on canvas
The Dicke Collection
© John Alexander