Exhibit brings Robert McCauley home again

Greg Robinson, a former director of the Museum of Northwest Art, offered a different kind of homecoming last Saturday: He opened MoNA’s “Robert McCauley: American Fiction” with a 45-minute slide lecture to an appreciative audience of about 50 people, most of them getting a different view of MoNA: they had just attended the annual membership meeting.

McCauley, the son of generations of Mount Vernon loggers, accompanied his dad into the woods. Born in 1946, he “grew up watching forests fall. That had an impact on him,” Robinson explained. His dad became an activist. McCauley was also influenced by time spent intermittently on the Swinomish Reservation.

McCauley spent his entire career at Rockford College, as an art professor and chair of the art department before retiring to Mount Vernon in 2008. More than an art historian’s perspective informs his work, though. Robinson stressed McCauley’s emphasis on American history, saying “an ethics of conquest is a major theme in his work, [but also] a sense of humor comes out of a deep love for history,” so we do not repeat its mistakes.

Slides from the exhibit brought home its four themes: 1. “worlds in collision;” 2. “Native Americans and Manifest Destiny;” 3. “Europeans Impact on the Environment;” and 4. McCauley’s Studio at his Mount Vernon home.

Robison said McCauley “talks about having painted the same painting his entire life,” and suggested reflecting on that idea after viewing the exhibit.

McCauley takes luminism, a late mid-nineteenth century American landscape painting style with a distinct type of light, and upends its meaning. His light portends a forbidding darkness, said Robinson. His technique uses up to 20 layers of glazing to provide an “ages old three-dimensional feeling.” The paintings in some of the slides look as if they are 150 years old, both in terms of the scene and the appearance of the painting.

Robinson pointed out the complex meaning behind McCauley’s choice of frames. Many are heavy, large, black painted wood. Some are sheathed in copper or lead, symbolic of American mining of natural resources.

The “sublime” in painting, historically, has signaled the metaphysical, religiosity. “Abandoning the Sublime,” an iconic painting in McCauley’s oeuvre, has six creatures, two birds, a bee, frog, rabbit and squirrel, fleeing a painting, a luminous, yet oddly polluted orange skyscape behind them. Their present is not idealized. McCauley seems to ask, “do they have any future at all?’

Robinson suggested that animals don’t trust that humans will solve the problem of the mess we have created. He used this painting, and others, to highlight McCauley’s sense of humor, dark though it may be.

Robinson’s last words were “This is a complicated show. This has been a complicated day at MoNA.” Each is worth the effort and deserving of time, attention and reflection.

This exhibit was created in partnership between MoNA and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Robinson developed the exabit with Katherine Moles, MoNA’s former Northwest Legacy Projects Curator. “American Fiction” had a successful run at BIMA, closing February 28.

The exhibit runs through June 10. The museum is open every day. There is no admission fee.

Robinson, chief curator at BIMA, was MoNA’s executive director from 2005-10.