Untitled (Reclining Nude in Sunlight) (N.D. (≤1973) oil on canvas, 50 x 60 1/8”)
Shirley Gorelick in Provincetown
by Lee Roscoe
Shirley Gorelick has a deep Cape connection. Director of Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM)’s and curator of an upcoming Gorelick exhibition, Chris McCarthy was introduced to her work at a cocktail party at Gorelick’s daughter’s house in Wellfleet years ago. She became intrigued, especially when she found out Gorelick had studied briefly, but with big effect, with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, and that some of her work was created in town where the family spent summers.
Gorelick’s art is relatively unknown and so bringing it to light in a major exhibition at PAAM delights McCarthy. Gorelick has started to emerge from the shadows at shows stressing her later style of supra-real figurative “personal humanism,” but McCarthy wants to unmask her earlier works, where Gorelick was not so much finding her voice as creating with many voices, from early realism to abstract expressionism, non-objective art, and cubism. She would circle to social realism and then back to some of her earlier influences of abstract landscape, McCarthy says, commenting that, “A lot of play has been given to more realistic work. I love her abstract work and that’s what, as director, I wanted to concentrate on.”
McCarthy identifies with Gorelick’s journey because her own went through many changes, trying different things, before landing as the director of PAAM in 2001. She says the changes initiated to combine traditional and non-traditional art created a rift at PAAM in the years 1927-37, and even her own efforts to embody the past and the modern in the renovation of PAAM met with some resistance, before the museum proved itself under her leadership as not just a local repository, but a nationally known museum. Her mission was to bring back work created in and by Provincetown-connected artists and to keep work produced here on site. She’s grown the PAAM from 900 objects to 5300 objects in her time here.
McCarthy is impressed by artists such as Gorelick who can switch different mediums such as painting, sculpture, intaglio, and printmaking so adeptly. “I like artists who take risks,” who dare to change, she says.
She’s been wowed by Gorelick’s art for years, with ideas for exhibiting her percolating in the back of her mind. She says although she doesn’t paint, her art is hanging exhibitions. “I just get into the zone,” she explains. She improvisationally figures out what will best hang where and next to what. She doesn’t have a mockup; she says the work tells her “where it wants to be.”
The Gorelick exhibition will hang in the Hans Hofmann Gallery around the time PAAM features jazz concerts, and she finds that serendipitous because Gorelick has “a rhythm” that is jazz-like in her art and which riffs on her many influences, from Chaim Gross, Moses Soyer, and Raphael Soyer (who themselves have Provincetown ties) to Hofmann, paying homage to them without copying them.The mostly oil paintings span four decades, and you can see Gorelick’s evolution in them, her search for expression, her risk-taking.
McCarthy says Gorelick learned “form and space, space and color” from Hofmann in 1947 and she realized she used too much color. But his insistence on abstracting the human form troubled her and she discovered she wanted to express people she knew (especially Libby, a Black friend she used repeatedly as a model) with a more literal depiction that seemed more revelatory and respectful. Although the paintings of Libby’s interracial family, the unique paintings of one person in two different aspects, and the Libby nudes are not in this show, there is one lovely nude, dissolving with light and mystery called Untitled (Reclining Nude in Sunlight) from around 1973. And there is a fascinating variety of form and subject matter. One of the abstracted figural paintings seems to be a body metaphorizing torment, another of a face of a masked war figure; these are a bit like Frances Bacon’s art in expressing an inner psychological interior through outer form, a human becoming or un-becoming. And in a sense the work in the exhibition struggles with this “becoming” of the artist and of the human form. There are other emergences: suggestions of cities and various non-human realities, slightly cubistic, and also an early slightly Van Gogh-like self-portrait, and a handsome portrait of her and her husband.
Born in 1924, and passing in 2000, McCarthy says Gorelick was a “major feminist,” involved with two feminist galleries, but nonetheless with a long and seemingly happy marriage to Leonard, a dentist who, according to his New York Times obituary, made “significant contributions in the study of technologies used to make ancient seals and other objects… shedding light on how ancient man transformed stones into works of art and instruments of commerce.”
McCarthy says Gorelick was a “cool” mother, giving her son and daughter freedom to roam the streets of Provincetown, adding that she would have loved to have known her. Gorelick’s daughter, Jamie, is a high-powered attorney who was Deputy Attorney General from 1994 to 1997 in the Clinton administration. McCarthy praises her for keeping her mother’s collection of work in fabulous condition. The two will give a Q and A on July 31. One of the subjects will likely be how the family’s politics affected Jamie’s own career choices. The artist was also a progressive activist involved with the movements of the 1960s and 70s—not only women’s rights but also the labor movement, the anti-war movement, gay rights, and racial equality. But while the psychological does appear in this exhibition, the political is rare and subtle. Somehow, Gorelick’s Jewish sensibility emerges in her art’s quest, as a sense of being a Joker’s Wild, identifying with everyone who is “the Other”.
McCarthy says every time she views Gorelick’s work she sees something different. “I’m drawn to the texture, palette, and color of these paintings. They’re really big and bold. When you walk into that space those paintings are going to knock you over.”
Director’s Choice: Shirley Gorelick in Provincetown runs through September 1 at PAAM, 460 Commercial St., Provincetown. On Thursday, July 31, at 6 p.m., exhibition curator Christine McCarthy and daughter of the artist, Jamie Gorelick will speak at a Fredi Schiff Levin lecture. $15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members. For more information call 508.487.1750 or visit paam.org.
