Review (Two Coats of Paint): Edith Schloss’s deep cheer

Edith Schloss, Blue Italian Skies Above, 1968, oil on canvas, 11 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson

As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. Many of the paintings depict a swatch of Italian beach to which she decamped from Rome – her primary home from 1962, when she left New York, until her death in 2011. A tranquil blue seems dominant in her palette, and the phenomena she presents in her calculatedly primitive pastiches – flowers, butterflies, tablecloths, tchotchkes, the sun, the moon, occasionally what looks phallic – can all be associated with good vibes of one kind or another. Don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna, though. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.

The sense of that quality is not tragic but rather stoic – maybe wistful but resolutely short of sentimental. As she reveals in her posthumously published memoir The Loft Generation, she was far from clueless. She decried the diminution of women in the “what the fuck man’s land” of the New York art scene in the 1950s, and later the difficulty of being taken seriously as an artist while earning a living as an art writer and critic. When her work comes under closer scrutiny, the blue cheer of the 20 paintings yields to mood shifts, conveyed by changing seasons, weather, or time of day, rendered with elegant simplicity, and echoed in Schloss’s titles.

“Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above,” Alexandre Gallery, 291 Grand Street, LES, New York, NY. Through June 4, 2022.