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Ben Davis, Artnet News' National Art Critic since 2016:
Sometimes it is nice—particularly in the drifting, slow-motion depths of the summer—to just let art happen to you. I wandered around Tribeca the other day and found myself in George Adams Gallery’s basement space, viewing a show of works by Susan Hauptman (1947-2015), and one of her drawings happened to me.
This is not an artist I knew or know much about. She died in 2015, in her late 60s, with a fine enough but hardly flashy career: a position leading an art school (at the University of Georgia), works and shows in various museums, and the confidence of a signature style.
The work I ended up in front of is Self Portrait (With Feathers), 2007, described by the gallery as Hauptman’s “most ambitious work.” It isn’t exactly brash or swaggering. The detailed drawing gives you the artist’s own face on the left, frowning, I think, and meeting your gaze levelly. It captures the lines in her face and spots on her skin.
Though it is titled as a self-portrait, Hauptman is accompanied on the right side of the drawing by a similarly detailed depiction of her husband, Leonard, who is also looking out. He’s a frequent presence in her work; I recognize his face from a fine profile portrait of him elsewhere in this small show.
The Hauptman figure is wearing a polka-dotted costume, its fabric rendered in silky detail, and a conical hat, rendered in mere outline. Leonard’s head seems to float in the black charcoal expanse, looking bemused. He is wearing a white cap, to which Hauptman has appended actual black feathers. A white feather suggests a pom-pom at the top of her own hat. It is a whimsical detail, but not too whimsical.
This is not the kind of thing that I would expect to have an effect on me, but it did have an effect on me. Precisely because I did not know the artist, it was a good test of an image’s power to carry on its own—though, of course, there is a certain hauntedness to a self-portrait by a dead artist, an effect that the moody precision of the medium draws out.
I read a bit about Hauptman, just to see if there was something I should know. The word “androgyny” recurs in the scattered reviews. In her various self-portraits, she played on the contrast between feminine costumery and a butch appearance.
In other drawings (a few are in the George Adams show), she turned to still life, often depicting porcelain figures or flowers. These are evocative of femininity, though her chosen medium drained them of their colors. Sometimes, she added selectively colored details, emphasizing her choice to activate certain symbols.
You can fold Hauptman’s work into various narratives of gender performance—Cindy Sherman occasionally features as a point of comparison, I see—and her art may have been trendier if the work had been more pointed or confrontational. But they feel very self-contained.
A work like Self Portrait (With Feathers) gives you a self that knows itself well enough to appear through its relation to another person; a bluntly unvarnished presentation that is also serenely theatrical. It feels like it is withdrawing from you into its own world at the same time that it is coming at you. It is serious, but not too sure how seriously to take that seriousness. That is the fate of a lot of artists, who are caught between what makes them content in their art and what an imagined audience wants or needs. That’s what I choose to think that this work is about.
I left the cool gallery with the artwork, went up the stairs into the sun, and headed back home to think about it.
”Susan Hauptman: Drawings” is on view at George Adams Gallery in New York through Friday, August 14.