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long limbs filling the tub in which her husband often depicted her.
Bradford’s swimmers, however, unconstrained by architecture or do-
mestic accoutrements, hover in expansive, indeterminate seas of color.
The smallness of Bradford’s figures against their surroundings can em-
phasize their freedom, but it can also, like Bonnard’s images of Marthe
in the tub, convey a sense of isolation and mystery.
George Segal’s
vigorously scrawled pastel returns us to Bonnard’s con-
templation of Marthe, but in contrast to the French painter’s essentially
passive subject, the American sculptor’s model seems to be in lively mo-
tion. Like Bonnard, Segal plays the subtly indicated grid of the wall tiles
against the robust volumes of a voluptuous nude, but where Bonnard
often subsumes Marthe’s slender form with surrounding veils of color,
Segal emphasizes the mass and weight of his model’s body, reminding
us, should we have forgotten, that no matter how pictorial the tableaux
he constructed, he was someone who thought in three dimensions.
Larry Poons
,
Jackie Saccoccio
, and
Cecily Kahn
are all abstract paint-
ers whose works are about the history of their own making, about the
agency of the artist, and about the sensuous physicality of paint. Most
of all, like Bonnard, the three painters revel in the power of color to