M. Louise Stanley

M. Louise Stanley is an American painter known for irreverent figurative work that combines myth and allegory, satire, autobiography, and social commentary.Chadwick, Whitney. "Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California Painting," ''Art Journal'', College Art Association of America, Winter, 1985, p. 309–13.Landauer, Susan. "Having Your Cake and Painting It, Too," ''The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration'', Kansas City, KS: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art/San Jose Museum of Art, 2000.Baker, Kenneth
"Laugh Lines / San Jose Museum of Art's `Lighter Side' features artists breaking with New York orthodoxy,"
'San Francisco Chronicle'', September 4, 2000, G1. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Desmarais, Charles
"M. Louise Stanley’s very contemporary history paintings,"
''San Francisco Chronicle'', May 9, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Writers such as curator Renny Pritikin situate her early-1970s work at the forefront of the "small, but potent" Bad Painting movement, so named for its "disregard for the niceties of conventional figurative painting."Pritikin, Renny
"M. Louise Stanley @ Richmond Art Center,"
''SquareCylinder'', April 12, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Porges, Maria
M. Louise Stanley @ Kala,"
''SquareCylinder'', May 9, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Stanley's paintings frequently focus on romantic fantasies and conflicts, social manners and taboos, gender politics, and lampoons of classical myths, portrayed through stylized figures, expressive color, frenetic compositions and slapstick humor.Shere, Charles. "Women's Art that Aims for Higher Values," ''Oakland Tribune'', January 30, 1977.Winter, David. "M. Louise Stanley," ''ARTnews Magazine'', March 1986.Rubin, David. "M. Louise Stanley at Rena Bransten," ''Art in America'', April 1986.Fisher, Jack. "Often-hilarious wicked exhibit takes a look at moral depravity," ''San Jose Mercury News'', May 5, 2002. Art historians such as Whitney Chadwick place Stanley within a Bay Area narrative tradition that blended eclectic sources and personal styles in revolt against mid-century modernism; her work includes a feminist critique of contemporary life and art springing from personal experience and her early membership in the Women's Movement.Plagens, Peter. "4 Bay Area Painters," ''Artforum'', June 1972, p. 87–9.Jan, Alfred. "M. Louise Stanley at Haines," ''Visions'', Summer, 1991, p. 42.Fisher, Jack. "S.J. Museum of Art offers look at figuration movement's humor," ''San Jose Mercury News'', September 25, 2000. Stanley has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.Miller, M. H
"Here Are the 2015 Winners of Guggenheim Fellowships,"
''ARTnews'', April 14, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Noomin, Diane (ed). "Contributor Biographies,
''Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival''
New York: Harry Abrams, 2019, p. 259. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Winter, David. "Artists the Critics are Watching," ''ARTnews'', November 1984, p. 91–3. Her work has been shown at institutions including PS1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The New Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art, and belongs to public collections including SFMOMA, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, and de Saisset Museum.Koppman, Debra. "M. Louise Stanley at the SFMOMA Rental Gallery," ''Artweek'', February 2000.Benson, Heidi
"San Jose Museum's Landauer Loves 'the Hunt,'"
'San Francisco Chronicle'', April 15, 2001. Retrieved September 27, 2019.San Jose Museum of Art
M. Louise Stanley works
Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Oakland Museum of California
"M. Louise Stanley,"
Collections. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Stanley lives and works in Emeryville, California.Thym, Jolene. "Creators at Risk," ''Oakland Tribune'', May 16, 1993, p. C1, C7.

Early life and career

M. Louise Stanley was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1942, and grew up in South Pasadena, California.Auping, Michael. "M. Louise Stanley, Matrix/Berkeley 14" (exhibition essay), Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1978. Her parents, William ("Bill") and Marie Stanley, both children of missionary parents, first met in China as teenagers.Hall, Stan. "Retired Scientist Tests Old Master Violin Makers; Finds They Were Right," ''Carmel Valley Sun'', April 18, 1990, p. 16. After their families later re-settled in the United States, they reunited, married, and had three children, Louise, Susan and Alfred; Bill became an analytical chemist, and Marie, a chemical laboratory technician. Louise took an early interest in classical art and illuminated manuscripts (including the Gutenberg Bible) through visits to the nearby Huntington Library. She learned to paint alongside her father, who was an accomplished watercolorist, and in his retirement, a violin-maker.Dowling, Lynn. "Louise Stanley: Portrait of the Artist," ''The Santa Clara'', October 15, 1981 p. 17–8.

Stanley attended the conservative, Brethren La Verne College (BA, 1964), supplementing her studies by motor-scootering to Scripps College for life drawing classes.''Boston Voyager''
"Art & Life with M. Louise Stanley,"
''Boston Voyager'', August 20, 2018. Retrieved September 27, 2019. In 1965, she moved to the Bay Area and enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts (BFA, 1967; MFA, 1969), where she found a like-minded community. She studied with Peter Saul and was influenced by H. C. Westermann and sources such as Outsider art, underground comics, and the Alameda flea market. In the early 1970s, she was one of the early Bay Area artists to join the emerging Woman's Movement, along with Judith Linhares; their organized group of women artists took part in several gender-focused exhibitions that helped to establish the legitimacy of personal, narrative-based and feminist work.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanley began teaching, lecturing and exhibiting across the country, including solo shows at PS1 and Women's Interart Center (New York) and Matrix Gallery (UC Berkeley), the Rena Bransten and Quay galleries (San Francisco), and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum;Trebay, Guy. "El Lay Paints Itself," ''The Village Voice'', May 1, 1978.Anderson, Bill. "Mythology for Moderns," ''The Independent'' Santa Barbara, March 26, 1987. she also appeared in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, Newport Harbor Museum, The New Museum and Fashion Moda (New York), de Saisset Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and Artists Space (1988), among others.Fish, Mary. "Market Street Artists," ''Artweek'', July 7, 1973.Auping, Michael. "Colliding: Myth, Fantasy, Nightmare," New York: Artists Space, February, 1988.Baker, Kenneth. "M. Louise Stanley," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', March 24, 1987. Her first trips to Italy in the 1980s inspired new classical elements in her work, as did her personally conducted "Art Lover's Tours" to Europe, which began in 1994 and numbered fourteen in total.

In subsequent years, in addition to gallery shows, Stanley has received retrospectives at the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery (1999) and Dominican University (2007) and solo shows at the Richmond Art Center, Kala Art Institute (2019), and MarinMOCA (2021); she has participated in major group shows at The Drawing Center, San Jose Museum of Art and Oakland Museum, among others.Morris, Barbara. "M. Louise Stanley at Dominican University," ''Artweek'', December 2007/January 2008, p. 16–7.Cheng, DeWitt, "Ovid Redux: M. Louise Stanley Paints the Classics at the Kala Institute," ''East Bay Express'', May 8, 2019, p. 17.Wasserman, Abby. "The Art of Narrative," ''The Oakland Museum Magazine'', Winter, 1991. She is represented by Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco.Anglim Gilbert Gallery
"M. Louise Stanley,"
Artists. Retrieved September 27, 2019.

Work and reception

Writers characterize Stanley as "a socially and politically engaged satirist" in the tradition of history painting, whose work documents the human condition, modern-day romance, and contemporary social issues using humor, allegory, myth and idiosyncratic, expressive figuration. She emerged amid a 1960s Bay Area art scene that reacted against Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and the disengagement of Pop art by embracing eclectic and "low-brow" influences—Bay Area funk and figuration, surrealism, Chicago's Monster Roster, urban street life, comics and popular media—to create socially engaged narrative work.Chadwick, Whitney. "Bay Area Narrative Painting" (exhibition essay), University Art Gallery, San Francisco: San Francisco State University, 1977. For Stanley and many others, the Women's Movement was equally influential, stimulating consciousness-raising and the development of forms of expression based on personal imagery, experiences and feelings; in the later 1970s several of these women (Stanley included) were associated with the "Bad Painting" movement, noted for its rejection of "good taste," social taboos and obviously displayed skill.Leonard, Michael. "Having Fun with History," ''Artweek'', February 28, 1991.Linhares, Phil. "A School of Painting Born at C.C.A.C.," ''Review'', February 21, 1984, p. 9.

Early figurative satires (1970–9)

Stanley dubbed the iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek style of her early work "junior high realism," pointing up its affinity with irreverent notebook-doodle caricature and preference for emotional and observational truth over realism.Stanley, M. Louise
"Archive 1969–1979,"
Work. Retrieved September 28, 2019. She painted satires of polite-society formality and American lifestyles, bawdy barroom vignettes, sexually charged domestic scenes and fantastical moments of oddball horror (e.g., ''Rust's Wedding'', 1971).Brown, Christopher. "Sam Richardson's Reductivism, Louise Stanley's Funk," ''Artweek'', January 28, 1978.Curtis, Cathy. "6 Aspiring Water Colorists," ''Richmond Independent'' Sunday Magazine, October 14, 1979.Albright, Thomas. "A Show of the Outrageous," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', September 27, 1972. They expressed both private feelings, fears and fantasies and her politicized feminist consciousness—often through powerfully assertive, "brassy" 1930s-1940s-styled women that critics likened to Benton or Reginald Marsh figures, like those in her works ''The Mystic Muse and the Bums Who Sleep on the Golf Course Behind the Oakland Cemetery'' (1970) and ''Barroom Brawl'' (1977).Paul, April. "Line, Laughter, Lechery," ''California Aggie'', January 25, 1978.

Reviews noted Stanley's elongated, swan-necked figuration, expressive draftsmanship, tilted compositions and electric colors, and watercolor mastery;Loach, Roberta. "Touching All Things," ''Visual Dialogue Quarterly'', Women in the Visual Arts, Spring 1977. ''Artforum'' critic Peter Plagens described it as attaining "a clumsy luminosity reminiscent of Marsden Hartley or John Kane," while the ''San Francisco Chronicle'''s Thomas Albright deemed it the "Bay Region's answer to Chicago's Hairy Who." During this time, Stanley often showed in pointedly gender-oriented exhibitions or groupings: a section of "Paintings on Paper" (San Francisco Art Institute, 1971), "Touching All Things" (Civic Art Center, Walnut Creek, 1977) and "Her Story" (Oakland Museum, 1991);Heyman, Therese. ''Her Story: Narrative Art by Contemporary California Artists'' (catalogue), Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1991. these shows were sometimes appreciated for their then-novel exploration of inner life and sexual politics, and other times misunderstood or dismissed as "suburban," dilettantish, even sexist by largely male reviewers.Frankenstein, Alfred. "Art That's fit for 'Ladies,'" ''San Francisco Chronicle'', January 21, 1978.Martin, Fred. "Touching All Things or Touching Too Many," ''Artweek'', Feb. 5, 1977.

Classical and contemporary allegories

In the early 1980s, Stanley introduced two new elements into her work: travel-inspired classical motifs that she mixed with contemporary themes and situations, and a '' Zelig'' or Where's Wally-like alter ego she called the "Archetypal Artist," who metamorphosed into various contemporary and mythical roles, clad in a red-and-white striped shirt and green Capri pants.Winter, David. "Louise Stanley's work Merits Three Stars," ''The Peninsula Times Tribune'', October 29, 1981. The classical influence included Rococo oil brushwork and chiaroscuro modeling, mural-sized canvasses, elaborate faux-gilded, '' trompe-l'oeil'' proscenia and frames (e.g., ''Anatomy Lesson'', 2003) and Pompeiian or French-baroque room installations with pedestals and papier-mâché Greek vases.Van Proyen, Mark. "Archaic Forms, Suburban Sagas," ''Artweek'', March 19, 1983. Stanley's signature slapstick humor, expressiveness and formal characteristics remained, now employed in increasingly detail-packed parodies and farcical melodramas of women confronting romantic conflicts, fantasies and fears, and social taboos.Dunham, Judith. "Foibles and Fabrications," ''Artweek'', March 29, 1980. Critic David Winter likened their wit to English caricaturists such as Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, but "seasoned" with the authentically American influences of 1930s Realism and '' Mad Magazine'' zaniness.

Stanley used mythological elements (in works such as ''Cupid Chastised or the Morning After'' or ''Leda and the Swan'') to both flesh out her modern dramas and evoke the irrational, while camouflaging the personal; her humor functioned to demystify myths, puncture art-world seriousness, and balance darker psychological themes.Shere, Charles. "Four Exhibits by Women Artists," ''Oakland Tribune'', April 1, 1980.Kakuda, Sand. "Greek Ideal turns to Sardonic Comment on Battle of Sexes," ''The Stockton Record'', May 19, 1993. ''Art in America'' critic David S. Rubin wrote that Stanley's colorful worlds, ironic situations and The Walt Disney Company, Disneyesque characters (Athena, Adonis, nymph, cupid and satyr figures) both seduce and "bring us face-to-face with serious content"; he and others compare her visual strategies to those of painter Robert Colescott.

In contemporary scenes, Stanley chronicles romance, friendship, and art-world experiences; ''Artweek'''s Cathy Curtis described them as "the art world's answer to Dorothy Parker, Erma Bombeck, and Erica Jong."Curtis, Cathy. "The Mundane Meets the Bizarre," ''Artweek'', November 28, 1981. In ''Sacred and Profane Love'' (1982) and ''All That Glitters Is Not Gold'' (1988),San Jose Museum of Art
''All That Glitters Is Not Gold''
M. Louise Stanley, Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2019. women confront romantic predicaments: fighting to redirect her man's attention from a nearby nude statue, or in the latter, women's fruitless curiosity about men. Curator Susan Landauer suggests Stanley's work often carries a "mischievous confessional irony," achieved by inserting an alter ego that reviewers describe as an ideal woman as envisioned by junior-high teen steeped in 1950s daytime television, ''Archie Comics'' and ''Seventeen (American magazine), Seventeen'' magazine. ''Jupiter and Io'' (1981) and ''Pygmaliana'' (1985) offer sexual fantasies—the alter ego cavorting with lusty gods or spirits sprung to life from mid-air or paintings—while ''Outside Interference'' (1988) shows her violently kicking in her television.Shere, Charles. Review, ''The Oakland Tribune'', January 21, 1986.Van Proyen, Mark. "Enigmatic Images and Suggestive Forms," ''Artweek'', December 26, 1987. In other cases, she confronts artistic crises and scenarios: bravely wielding palette and brush to confront her own enormous, Athena-shaped shadow (''A Painting of Courage'', 1991),Stanley, M. Louise
''A Painting of Courage''
Archive 1990–1999, Work. Retrieved September 28, 2019. solitarily smoking on a bed in Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh's famed bedroom, facing male critics (''Judgment of Paris'', 2005),San Jose Museum of Art
''Judgment of Paris''
M. Louise Stanley, Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2019. or attempting to cheer up Albrecht Dürer, Durer’s sad-faced angel in ''Melencolia I, Melancolia (after Dürer)'' (2012).

Later history paintings and sketchbooks

Stanley's later work increasingly followed in the tradition of history painting, documenting contemporary issues and follies through large-scale, elaborately coded allegories.Stanley, M. Louise
"The Classics/Art History,"
Work. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Cheng, DeWitt
"It's Not My Fault,"
''Visual Art Source'', September 21, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Moriarty, Jocelyn and Sean Hapgood. ''M. Louise Stanley'', Arcata, CA: Humboldt State University, 2000. ''San Francisco Chronicle'' critic Charles Desmarais describes them as displaying "an antic intelligence and a loose style ... at [its] best when humorously sending up classical subjects and Old Master concerns" (e.g., ''Truncis Naribus (Faces Without Noses)'', 2014). They include skewerings of male folly (''Midas'', 1997, which depicts the king touching something he shouldn't have), and female foibles (her 1999 restaging of the ''Seven Deadly Sins'' in a women's restroom).Stanley, M. Louise
''Seven Deadly Sins''
The Classics/Art History, Work. Retrieved September 28, 2019. Other works, however, were more psychologically subtle, their humor submerged in favor of more pointed, unflinching social commentary and somber humanism addressing Homelessness in the United States, homelessness (''20th Century Genre'', 1994), tragedy and grief (''Memento Mori (After Columbine'', 1999), and abuse of power (''Bad Bankers'', 2011), that ''Artweek'' compared to the satires of Honoré Daumier, Daumier.Modenessi, Jennifer."LMC offers art as social comment," ''Ledger Dispatch'', November 29, 2002, p. 2.Wood, Sura. "Mythical Creatures Unbound," ''Bay Area Reporter'', October 19, 2017.

Stanley's closely guarded sketchbooks, long a key resource of ideas and studies anchoring her paintings, came to the fore in two solo exhibitions; nearly thirty were shown alongside her paintings at Dominican University (2007), while the survey "Faces Without Noses" (Richmond Art Center, 2019) was primarily dedicated to them. Curator Renny Pritikin describes the sketchbooks as "highly skilled and frequently wildly satiric" volumes full of "visual morsels devoured during her frequent trips to European museums"; ''Artweek'' suggested that they offer less filtered and processed forms of her "relentless pursuit" of old-master draftsmanship, painting techniques and pictorial challenges.

Awards and public collections

Stanley has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015) and grants for painting from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2014), Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2005, 1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1989, 1982); she has received grants from Change, Inc. (2001) and the Fleishhacker Foundation (Eureka Grant, 1987) and a Djerassi Artists Residency (1989).Kala Art Institute
"Ovid Redux: M. Louise Stanley Paints the Classics,"
Exhibitions, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Stanley was also awarded a public art commission from her hometown of Emeryville to create ''Neighborhood Convergence'' (2004), a collaboration with sculptor Vickie Joe Sowell and lighting designer Jeremy Hamm that placed towering, wildly colorful steel characters based on Stanley's caricatures inside a local underpass.Yollin, Patricia
"Emeryville: Sculpted crowd finds home under the freeway,"
''San Francisco Chronicle'', November 12, 2004. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Todd, Gail
"Emeryville public art: City where art flourishes,"
''San Francisco Chronicle'', March 1, 2012. Retrieved September 28, 2019.

Stanley's work belongs to the public collections of the SFMOMA, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, de Saisset Museum, Mills College, The Pilot Hill Collection of Contemporary Art, Santa Clara University, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Triton Museum of Art, and Yale University, among others.

References

External links

M. Louise Stanley official websiteM. Louise Stanley
artist page
"Art & Life with M. Louise Stanley,"
interview

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stanley, M. Louise
21st-century American painters
20th-century American painters
American feminist artists
Artists from California
California College of the Arts alumni
1942 births
Living people
20th-century American women painters
21st-century American women painters
Artists from Charleston, West Virginia