The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 32

Akio Takamori’s Sleeping Woman in Pink and Blue Dress
(2013) is one of the few twenty-first-century works (and an
exceptional example of this Japanese-born artist) that has
a similar quality to Frey’s work. The modeling of the figure
is rudimentary and both Frey and Takamori use painting
to articulate and give the form detail. Takamori offers a
Judy Moonelis, Sisters, 1984.

minimalist, dry, matte approach to painting that seems to
be part of the skin of the figure, whereas Frey’s treatment

If a viewer looks at Man and His World and Grandmother
Figure and senses an influence from modernism in the
first half of the twentieth century, and further guesses that
it is German Expressionism, that’s close. Take it further
and identify this influence as Max Beckmann, one of
the best of that movement, then you have hit the mark.
Beckmann was Frey’s painting muse. In 1937 more than
five hundred of Beckmann’s works were confiscated
from German museums, and several of these works
were put on display in the notorious Degenerate Art
exhibition in Munich. Beckmann hid out in Amsterdam
until the war ended and then moved to St. Louis.

Judy Moonelis’ work captures the early 1980s mood of
the East Village style in New York, a time when avantgarde galleries like Gracie Mansion showed art that was
urgent and loud, used slashing line, bared teeth, and
unleashed emotion. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893)
could have been their patron saint. There is something
of German Expressionism as well in Moonelis’ large
planar heads of single figures and couples rendered in
silhouette. The effect is the opposite of Takamori. The
defining of features—eyes, lips, and nose—is aggressively
portrayed in relief. Color fills in and does not define.

Frey was fascinated by his paintings, in particular those

Form is in charge. And the texture, dry slip glazes, adds

painted after he moved to St. Louis. She took on his

to the seeming harshness of these facial landscapes.

device of breaking a figure into parts, each framed with
an increasingly emphatic black outline. This worked
very well in glaze painting, but Frey also followed this in
her drawings and paintings. Frey’s interest in dissecting
and framing the components of an image began with
her early “paint by numbers” paintings circa 1975,
but then she moved forcefully into a Beckmann-like
mode and remained there for the rest of her career.

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is to apply glossy glaze thickly with an impasto-like excess.

There is a surprisingly small part of the collection that
evokes the court figurine, perhaps because the collection
maintains a distance from the precious. But there are a
few examples, such as Patti Warashina’s feminist paean
Who Said I Couldn’t Fly (1979) and the disconcerting art
of Justin Novak. If the Marquis de Sade had became
a ceramicist one imagines that this is what he might
make. The comparison of Novak’s figures (not the