GORDON KIRSCHNER, M.D., P.C.
July 28, 1984
Dear Wendy:
I have wanted to write to you sooner but I have been distracted by many tasks, a style which seems to be necessary to my own creativity. Thank you for your generous display of your work and for sharing your time with me. I appreciated the opportunity to meet with you and explore with you the ideas your work stimulated in me. Your calm acceptance of my rather free associations and perhaps sometimes arcane interpretations was very comfortable. I frequently recall your paintings, especially the large pregnant pair, and hope I will have a chance to view them again before long.
After leaving you I went immediately to the Museum of American Art and looked up the Truitt column: "Seventeenth Summer." I was delighted, the pale green of a fresh shoot with the thin purple line at the top for the growing tip seemed a very apt metaphor. I was not so sure I could confirm my thought that her work appeals to unconscious longing for one's lost home of childhood. I also noticed in the gallery the dramatic trio "Summer, NY 1931" by Leon Kroll, which triggered off a further train of thought about your work, as I mention in the accompanying notes. I am sending them for your information and for you to use, if you wish, to help present your work.
Thank you again, and with very best wishes,
Cordially Yours,
Gordon Kirschner
REMARKS
ON BEING CONFRONTED WITH MONUMENTAL IMAGES OF WOMANHOOD
Remarks on viewing the painting of Wendy Kaye July 11, 1984
The confrontation is with canvases three to five feet in either dimension, covered with huge torsos of women, some pregnant, some solitary, some paired. Dedicated to the female nude for several years Ms. Kaye has generated images evoking experiences of awe, comfort and dismay. Domination and submission, sensuous touch, awesome presence, boundaries or boundarylessness; inside versus outside, are all aspects of the experience. Passion, fear, tenderness and anger are present in pudenda, bellies, breasts, hips. Subdued colors and soft focus contribute to the looming quality and lessen the potential shock of these daring images, shocking because they confront us with the presence of a huge naked female, daring because of the sexual references.
Kaye began with semi-realistic torsos seen straight on, proceeded to the "Birds": subtly colored figures with breasts bright as parrot feathers, figures of humor and mischief. There is one face, a large head, in profile, of a woman with an expression of pleasure or perhaps triumph. There is a detour into gestural abstract expressionism where the figure is only recognizable in the context of the other paintings. Then in a series of pairs, female torsoes in conjunction with each other express a series of emotional states easily evoking a sexual encounter yet also clearly portraying the themes of domination, submission, threatening intensity of feeling, labor, crisis and resolution.
Recent images focus on awe. BEACON: a large green breast adds to the image of a tower with a top lantern commanding attention. Here is also the beginning of her torn canvas technique, a result of a decisive dislike of an image and a sure conviction that it should be covered, yet not concealed by artifice, the cover implying evolution (revolution?) The two pregnant ones: a deep, dusky and sensuous paint surface in the brown belly, merging into the black silouhette of the vulva with a red glow from within: suggesting fire, passion, blood, moulton steel in the open hearth, volcanic eruption from the depths of the earth; the black bar on the breast like a wound or battle ribbon, adding a hint of the humor seen in the Birds series. Its partner in black, one of the most looming, awesomely monumental of the images .. , the modeling subtle, the darkness unrelieved. DIED: - dead white, the contrast with the black still violent yet conceivably ecstatic. Technically this marks the beginning of tolerance of dripping paint. It lacks the full conviction and subtle use of that means seen in the current work, the triple, folded panel with the figure taking on some of the distortion of Francis Bacon, the figure becoming sufficiently ambiguous for the viewer to take the (unconscious) path of blindness to the figurative image.
Perhaps these images evoke in the viewer forgotten childhood confrontation with the mother's body. While many of them have a strong sexual reference, seeing the
retrospective development of Kaye's work reveals that many have reference also to experiences of closeness with the implications of comfort, curiosity, intense attachment and the anxiety of being overwhelmed. The explicit gender representation should not divert us from the realization that a child's experience with the father may arouse the same themes and issues and that confronting these issues for all of us can have reference to fathers as well as mothers. However, since observation confirms that women have almost as much interest in the female nude as men, I conclude that all of us are fascinated by images ot the female nude because we share universal experiences, all of us have unconscious memory traces of the experience of being in conjunction with the body of the mother, and indeed even within that body; a condition that causes
great wonder in every child . We have a longing not only to return to the womb or the lap, but to confront and master the imponderables of the early experiences of sensual contact with our nurturing caretakers. For a woman, pregnancy and mothering a child rearouse these experiences so L assume these paintings also evoke that experience as well.
These themes must frequently have been important in the inspiration of artists of all periods. Four examples illustrate the variety of images expressing related themes:
The VENUS of Willendorf, anon., circa 12,000 BC (Museum of Natural History, Vienna) is a monumental figure in miniature. It expresses awe and ambivalent longing for
contact as directly as the large paintings of Kaye.
In the Piazza Vecchio in Florence, prominently mounted in the loggia, Cellini's PERSEUS AND MEDUSA presents the anxiety of the phobic response to the female and the counterphobic solution of beheading and thus subdueing her. 'l'he Medusa legend expresses the fear of closeness to the woman, the phobia being so great that Medusa cannot even be safely touched with a look, the sight of her face and hair 6f snakes being enough to turn a man to stone. Perseus avoids this fate by viewing her in the mirror of his polished shield and holds her severed head high to displace the dreaded fate on to his enemies. Beneath his feet her voluptuous body retains the vigor of life and not only may be safely viewed but also is without threat to the casual touch of Perseus' feet.
Leon Kroll's SUMMER, NEW YORK, 1931 in the Museum of Amerlcan Art, shows three sensuous females, a nude asleep in front of her sisters, awake and aware, confronting the viewer. Their gaze forces the viewer to reflect on the nature of intimacy and distance through the device of privacy invaded and the invader viewed. This conscious reference is closely approached in Kaye's pairs, where one body confronting another, sometimes in almost mirror image, portrays the experience of self-consciousness which we achieve through the experience of being seen by the other whom we see. The experience of knowing oneself through the eyes of another, a central tenet of Hegel, has been elaborated by psychoanalysts studying the development of self awareness.
Anne Truitt's "SEVENTEENTH SUMMER" in the same gallery also evokes issues of closeness and separation between mother and child, the latter obvious in the titled theme, referring to the moment when a girl is poised on the threshold of separation into adulthood. The former, the feel of closeness, subtly evoked in the loving attention to surface that characterizes her work. These examples can easily be multiplied by applying the same principles but Kaye has demanded attention to these themes by her directness and arresting style.
