即使是在积极individualistic days of beatnik San Francisco, Bernice Bing was an outlier. Being proudly Chinese American and lesbian would have been obstacles enough. How on earth did she think she could get away with being a woman who painted with the confidence of a male Abstract Expressionist?
索诺玛山谷艺术博物馆很好地丢弃的年代urface of an answer in a lively, yet ultimately sobering, exhibition. “Bingo: The Life and Art of Bernice Bing” (the title is based on a lifelong nickname) runs through Jan. 5. An equally lively catalog essay by the California art scholar Susan Landauer fills in details only suggested by the show of 19 paintings and 10 drawings, which one suspects was limited both by gallery space and the availability of works.
Born in 1936 in Chinatown, Bing was orphaned at age 5 after her father died in jail and her mother — “a hat girl and waitress at the Forbidden City,” by Landauer’s description — died from heart disease. She was raised in a religious orphanage and by an ever-changing series of relatives and foster parents.
Landauer creates a portrait of a rebellious kid who matures into an omnivorously curious adult, an artist often poised on the edge of a success that ultimately eluded her in life (Bing died in 1998). She argues that Bing was, in fact, accepted into the San Francisco counterculture art scene of the early 1960s, but has since been largely erased by a New York-centric art world because she didn’t have the right contacts nor the requisite “heterosexuality as well as white skin and possession of a Y chromosome.”
The story is not so simple.
Bing was, indeed, one of four women invited in 1960 to share the indignity of participating in a show called “Gangbang” with 15 men at the pioneering Batman Gallery. Along with Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, women who are now considered central figures of the era, the exhibition featured Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, Robert Hudson, William Wiley and other male artists who would eventually receive national recognition.
Bing subsequently had a one-person show in 1961, also at Batman. Critic Alfred Frankenstein had good things to say about it in The Chronicle, but his review amounted to no more than a single paragraph. That seems emblematic of the support the young artist received, both at the beginning and throughout her career.
Some of the paintings in that early exhibition to which Landauer gives the most attention, in fact, no longer exist. “Only related drawings seem to have survived,” she writes of the artist’s “Dark Angel” series, begun in 1959. “These were the paintings that Bing emphasized as representative of her Beat period” later in life.
The author does not mention the fate of Bing’s “monumental 144-inch-wide ‘Diptych’ (1961),” which she praises for “centrifugal thrusts (that) … suggest movement beyond the physical limits of the canvas’s edge, sharing (Clyfford) Still’s urge to break ‘the Euclidean prison’ of stretcher bars.” An online search turns up a single reproduction of the work, with a caption that reads: “Destroyed.”
Two paintings included in that fateful early exhibition were based upon Diego Velázquez’s 17th century masterpiece, “Las Meninas.” One, incongruously titled “Velasquez Family,” is included in the Sonoma Valley show, and it is terrific, full of a savage energy the Spanish master would not have understood. Violent reds and lacerating gesture occupy the foreground, while the figure of Velázquez stoically observes from his famous doorway.
Later paintings and drawings show Bing working through the influence of teachers like Richard Diebenkorn (“Mayacamas No. 6, March 12,” 1963),Nathan Oliveira, Saburo Hasegawa and Clyfford Still (“Burney Falls,” 1980). They are not derivative, but they are not entirely inventive, either — they are the nascent impulses of an artist of great potential.
Two other essays and a timeline published in the exhibition catalog chronicle occasional shows throughout Bing’s life in respectable, if generally modest, venues. Another encouraging, one-paragraph review appears in the magazine Artforum. Bing worked in a range of jobs, from vineyard caretaker to community art coordinator. It was a life that many artists would be pleased to live, but not one that would have allowed exclusive or extended concentration on painting.
As time passed, her artistic concerns shifted, as one would hope they would. Yet the sense one gets from “Bingo” the exhibition is of a collection of notations for an art of great originality that might have been, had an artist who was herself an original been offered an environment that celebrated and supported her.
“Bingo: The Life and Art of Bernice Bing”:11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Through Jan. 5. $5-$10. Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, 551 Broadway, Sonoma. 707-939-7862.https://svma.org
