New Art Examiner
November, 1987

Critic's Choice
Claire Prussian
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Picture a female torso, close up, dominating a 22" x 30" Prismacolor drawing. The image is cropped to reveal only the figure's essentials: a woman reclining on satin sheets; a side view of one breast, belly, pubis and thigh; her jeweled hand in sharp focus. Framed and drawn as if it were a delicate pastel photograph, the picture emphasizes the gleam of the satin, the glittering rings on the woman's fingers, and the minutiae of her skin texture and pubic hair. Her body is relaxed, waiting. Sexy'? Wavering lines contour the body's weight against the sheet, sagging muscles and stretched-out skin create folds in places that once were taut; hair speckles the surface of a bulging stomach, and the ringed fingers are wrinkled. Clearly, Claire Prussian's nude is not a standard odalisque.

Now, visualize a small oil diptych. In the left-hand panel, a child sits on a geometrically patterned floor, playing with four toy-like pottery jars topped by
animal heads. She looks toward the right-hand panel, on which is painted a screen portraying three views of the same woman dressed in a lush, velvet evening dress. On the far right is a fourth view -- of her back -- as she watches the scene. The room's white walls are decorated with Egyptian relief paintings, a doorway provides a glimpse into the adjoining empty room with more Egyptian decoration. The clues coalesce: this is a tomb, the Canopic jars made for the entrails of mummies. Titled Three Frozen Images: Beginning, Middle, End (1984), it is static and timeless, yet tense with foreboding.

Another piece, Prismacolor IV 1976), pictures a socialite at a cocktail party. The drawing is cropped between nose and waist to emphasize a hard, red, talking mouth, abnormally long, red, claw like fingernails on wrinkled, many-ringed hands, holding a gleaming wine glass.

With disturbing images such as these, Claire Prussian shatters the comfortable myths to which we cling. By demystifying and exposing her subjects, she challenges popular beliefs: that money and position can somehow ameliorate the fact of our vulnerable humanity, that living gets easier with age, that the old somehow feel differently than the young about sagging flesh or the inevitability of death. Through her choice of subject matter, she questions what our society privileges: beautiful young people or successful, distinguished-looking men, distanced by their business suits from their human fleshiness, representing activities so acceptable in our society-banking, doctoring, lawyering, running corporations. Prussian makes pictures of these men's wives, presenting a unique vision both of the women and, by implication, of their men. We know, though we don't want to, that middle-aged people are us, either tomorrow, yesterday, or --horrible thought -- now. Prussian's paintings expose the fallacy of thinking that as we age, we no longer need to be admired, loved, or respected, that we have no dreams or erotic desires. Her art, by implication, disputes these ideas, ideas which give our society the excuse to devote our resources to the young at the expense of the aging.

Prussian's work is largely autobiographical and extremely personal. Shown and collected extensively in the Midwest for the past 15 years, it reflects life as seen through the eyes of a Chicago artist from an "upper-class" background who is painfully aware of her own struggles with aging. Reared in Chicago, educated in the early '50s at Wellesley College and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Prussian was familiar with the Art Institute's collection, and was undoubtedly influenced by Ivan Albright's portraits, among others. The wrinkles in her drawings bear a superficial resemblance to his rendering of skin, but his exaggerated, horrific, distancing images are antithetical to Prussian's vision. She depicts a milieu in which she is personally deeply embedded --painting herself, her family and friends, and their everyday surroundings and activities, much as in John O'Hara's and F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary portrayal of 1920s upper-class life. Unlike artists who use caricature to examine human foibles through generalizations from the outside, Prussian includes herself in all-too-human specifics. With affection and a penetration that misses little, she sees both herself and her peers as frail human beings - something an outsider could never do with equal clarity or precision.

Prussian's earliest works, executed in the 1960s, were small acrylic paintings of herself, her children, her affluent friends and neighbors, and her home in a neighborhood of substantial apartment buildings on Chicago's near north side. Painted in a deliberately flattened, highly detailed and decorative style showing the influence of Persian and early Christian painting, her work assumed added meaning in the climate of' militant feminism of the early '70s. Prussian became a founding member of Chicago's influential women's collective gallery, Artemisia, and found herself in the midst of a generation of women attempting to elevate previously degraded subject matter -- issues concerned with living rather than art -- into a position of respect.

Prussian's paintings were never genre scenes, despite their concentration on the home environment. Seeds of the anxiety and ambivalence which will find fullest expression in her later works surface here for the first time. Prussian describes her earliest efforts as an attempt to nail down the details of her existence in order to combat its ultimate unreality. These exquisitely precise paintings, in their materiality, were meant to counteract her fear of a reality so ephemeral it could shift radically or disappear at any moment. By 1974, Prussian's life had altered: her environment became a North Shore (Chicago) suburb with country clubs and swimming pools; her children grew up; and she herself approached middle age. Her work began to reflect this changed reality. Her vision shifted from youthful desires for stability -- embodied in home and family -- to the subject matter of change itself, as she began to draw women's aging bodies with Prismacolor pencils. She started to photograph her friends in familiar surroundings, later projecting these images on paper as the basis for her drawings.

At this time, Prussian's images began to reveal her fascination with and ambivalence toward her upper-class milieu and its values of affluence and power. Whereas earlier painters of the upper class such as John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam. and Mary Cassatt admired their subjects, identified with them, and espoused their values, Prussian achieves a critical edge. Instead of glamorizing her peers, she probes into the actualitv of their experience. She depicts the everyday life of Cinderella -- a submerged reality beneath the glamorous package wealthy men buy -- the life pretty girls strive for in order to attract the "right man. While documenting the empty glitter which attracts so many upwardly mobile people, she reveals the content of these women's lives.
          Women sit around the swimming pool, sunning, endlessly playing backgammon, mahjongg, and cards. Domesticated animals have replaced their grown children. Now the women spend their time polishing their nails into long, red claws, adorned with ornate, expensive jewels. In some drawings, such as Tapestry (1979), these aging hands are the sole subject matter, engaged in holding or reaching for food or drink. Expensive crystal, china, and silverware on a tapestry tablecloth highlight the plump, ripe fruit and form a vivid contrast to the overripe hands reaching for it. Other drawings focus on the women's hard, knowing, yet curiously vulnerable mouths and eyes. Their fashionably tanned skins dry up and wrinkle. Bikini-clad, they idle away their days, tanning, resting, and playing their games, perfecting their bodies for the night -- when a new competition begins in which beauty and chic are played off for love. Reality becomes a game of chance and skill, beauty, and aggressiveness, with the outcome uncertain, and time seemingly endless.

Prussian's most impressive work of this period focuses on the naked torsos of aging women. Unfulfilled desire exudes from her fragments of nude bodies: pampered, bejeweled, waiting; the loci of sexual desire. A repressed sexuality haunts these drawings. Wrinkles and sagging breasts, the details of pubic hair and stretched-out skin present a double whammy of eroticism and desire coupled with the naked aging flesh that is so repulsive to our youth oriented society. Pose and technique do not spare the viewer -- there is no safe place to hide.

A later series of portraits, begun in 1981, depicts women in full possession of themselves: fellow artists, friends, and acquaintances. Prussian now focuses on other aspects of herself, which she finds mirrored in her subjects. No incipient madness permeates these pictures, no questioning of reality, no uncontrolled. Inappropriate eroticism. Instead, these images impart a purposeful energy and grant personality a full reign. Clothed and surrounded by possessions, her subjects have controlled the chaos, for the moment. While less moving than the anxiety-ridden, tormented earlier pieces, they are nonetheless penetrating portraits of real people with a few ragged edges showing: the directness and toughness of dealer Grace Hokin's toothy grin (1982), sculptor Linda Kramer's ambivalent sexuality, and a friend's once-beautiful, aging face in Vanitas (1981), with unconcealed bags and wrinkles around her eyes, mouth, and neck.

These portraits led to a series of self-portraits (1983-1986) directly contemplating the cycle of life. Here, Prussian jams into small diptychs symbols of herself at different stages in her life, confronting different problems. She gathers old portraits of herself, paintings of her granddaughter, and objects from her childhood and mother's house in such tightly organized, claustrophobic compositions there is no room to breathe, to maneuver. She combines real things and people in real situations with images of fantasy and organizes them into spaces that constantly shift in scale and viewpoint. Themes of isolation, separation and memory intermingle in The Queens Chambers (1984), in which Prussian sits on a rocking chair facing an empty window, her back to the viewer, amidst her mother's memorabilia. She deals with similar issues in My Little House with the Chinese Men ( 1983), featuring a child under a table, holding a knife, near a picture of Chinese men with the now-familiar long fingernails. A particularly gripping piece, Paradise ( 1984), explores themes of madness and death in which a little girl (Prussian") watches a woman (Prussian')) floating in a pool near an uncaged tiger and a parrot. The implications of the woman's dissolving boundaries, the uncontrollable wildness of the tiger, and the bird that "parrots" back dialogue and behavior speak to her ongoing themes of a tenuous relationship with society, and the fine line that separates madness from normality. How well defined are normal psychic borders, how much must one suppress aggression. or "parrot" cultural expectations? Sutured Self (1983-4) and Resting Woman (among flowers) (1982) also confront tenuous bonding, fracturing, and death.

Prussian's technique with pencil and brush are similar to each other: her paintings are really colored-in drawings. Prismacolor and graphite are used for the drawings, acrylic and/or oil on canvas for paintings. Photographs are used as source material for her subjects and background material. In some works, photographic images are projected onto paper or canvas as a basis for drawing. Spare and dry, her surfaces are impeccable and very beautiful. A tightly controlled linearity pervades with short, precise, anxious strokes. Color is muted, elegant, very tasteful. Outlines are tough, not to be broached, and all-enclosing. This description of technique can also be a description of people or states of mind. It describes the persona many upper-class women, including Prussian, present to the world. Because Prussian's style is clearly an extension of her own persona, her directness and honesty include herself in her gaze.

Critical response to Prussian's work has been curious. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner in 1982 objected to her use of projected photographs, as though art is about skill, not choice, and other critics have attacked her on such issues as confining her subject matter primarily to rich women. Why Artner and others choose to focus on minor issues, ignoring or debasing the critical components of Prussian's aesthetic, is not so puzzling: her questioning of easy stereotypes about the rich, about aging, sexuality, and women, makes her work highly disturbing. Psychoanalytic thinking suggests that what is unconsciously upsetting is repressed and the resultant behavior is displaced onto less threatening material. Other psychologists theorize that material which ranges too far from the norm, or the comfortable, is dealt with by not being dealt with, or rejected.

Prussian's most recent work, not yet publicly exhibited, is more disquieting than ever. These maquettes and full-sized screens stand for the screening devices we use in response to old age, the preparation for death. No flesh, no hint of sexuality remains in the work. The women cease to reveal their bodies; they no longer wait for love. Fighting death and oblivion, they hide their desiccated bodies under shells of beautiful adornments.

One screen presents an abstracted image of a woman, enlarged from the queens in a deck of playing cards, and wearing Prussian's face. Leaded with jewels, the back of the screen uses patterns derived from the backs of ordinary cards.

In another screen, images of parrots, cut apart and rejoined, are arranged on barren branches. It is a lonely, flat, fleshless landscape, with jewels providing an artificial sparkle, and the coldly gaudy parrot substituting for the figure. A 10"-high maquette of another screen containing ghostly images of' women covered by dirty pink lace and netting looks to a depressing future of physical decline, perhaps Prussian's own.

In making visible her own fears and insecurities about aging, Prussian seeks to understand and control them. But, highly personal as her work is, it is neither narcissistic nor hermetic. While she depicts people of a particular class, they share larger, more fundamental issues with a much wider audience: how each of us chooses to live her or his life in the face of existential uncertainty, periodic chaos, and death.

What personas do we assume, what roles do we play in order to make life bearable? How do we filter our perceptions of the world, through what distorting mirrors do we see ourselves and our companions? How do we deal with the isolation we all bear within us and the fact of our own birth, childhood, sexuality, aging and death? How do extreme emotional states like anxiety fear, and depression alter our perceptions of the world, and our interactions in it?

Questions such as these, once not considered fit subject matter for art, are often still ignored in favor of those with easier solutions. In probing such issues, Prussian reminds us of what we do not want to know; yet In our very refusal to face life in all its dimensions, we diminish it. Prussian's strength lies in her anxiety-ridden, honest confrontation of the stages of life and, in so doing, remains vitally alive.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.