Florence Putterman: Traversing the Mediums
The
exhibition features over 30 works in a variety of media by Florence
Putterman, a Selinsgrove native whose successful career spans over
thirty years. Putterman is a painter and printmaker. Her work has a primitivistic
quality that is enhanced by her use of sand and crushed shells.
In their ebullience and unaffected optimism, the paintings of Florence Putterman recall the free wheeling inventiveness of the early Modernists. Having broken all the rules of painting, those pioneers of abstraction fashioned a new artistic language with which to express the remarkable changes sweeping in with the dawn of the twentieth century.
Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor to Art in America and author of Critical Condition: American culture at the Crossroads, published by Cambridge University Press
Born
in New York, Florence Putterman earned an undergraduate degree from New
York University in 1947. She continued her studies at Bucknell University
and in 1973 received her MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.
A Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania resident for the last fifty years, Putterman
was awarded a National Endowment Grant in 1979 and has been featured in
many solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Her works
have received numerous awards and accolades including the Distinguished
Alumni Award from Pennsylvania State University. Her painting and prints
can be seen in many museum and corporate collections including: the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago,
Chicago; and Jacksonville Museum, Polk Museum, and Gulf Coast Museum in
Florida. Putterman is listed in Who's Who in American Art, Who's Who in
American Women, and Who's Who in America.
Putterman’s medium is a very large part of her message. Its genesis involved a mini-epiphany: Putterman was sunning herself on the deck of a beach house, noticed the sand everywhere, and decided she wanted to use sand in her work. A conservator friend at a local museum suggested gessoing the wood or canvas ground, applying sand and crushed shells in admixture, then more gesso, the letting the whole solution dry…. So that this work about nature is made up of nature, about its very properties there in front of us. Yet they are there in front of us, at a remove: artistic intention has supplanted nature with human will, to some wild and wonderful figurative ends.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Putterman’s work in any medium is its high and fine formalism, its ability to visually clarify in limited space the boundless space of the human psyche, much as Jackson Pollock pictured cosmic space right from where he stood. And, where we tend to think of the human subconscious as a region of darkness, from the Lascaux caves to the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks and on, Putterman leaves us to form our own conclusions about the matter with, at least, a little light thrown on the subject….
Excerpted from an essay by Gerrit Henry for Florence Putterman: Art at the Four Corners at the Lowe Gallery, 1998. Gerrit Henry (1951-2003) was a contributing editor for Art News and published feature and critical articles in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times.
Florence Putterman: Traversing the Mediums is sponsored by
