Art: An artist's dazzling monuments to duality

Barbara Chase-Riboud has succeeded as a poet, novelist, and sculptor. I knew this before I saw her current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yet the imaginative power and material eloquence of this show of sculpture and drawings took me by surprise.

I had seen a few sculptures before, so I knew in general terms how Chase-Riboud worked. Yet seeing one doesn't adequately prepare the eye or the mind for the cumulative dazzle, complexity, and lushness she commands.

The drawings, boldly executed in charcoal, were a discovery. One series of 20, made mostly in the 1990s, depicts a series of imaginary monuments to historically prominent figures, from French novelist Emile Zola to the biblical Queen of Sheba.

The other, earlier drawings locate the roots of Chase-Riboud's visual vocabulary in studies of rocks and folded textiles.

Five of the 10 sculptures, each a marriage of bronze and fiber, come from a series the artist calls her Malcolm X Steles, dedicated to the murdered human rights leader. (A stele is a vertical slab or pillar, usually inscribed, that serves as a gravestone or memorial.)

Physically these are both imposing and poetic, normally an unlikely combination, but not for this artist. Materially, intellectually, and emotionally, the sculptures offer an impressive reconciliation of dichotomies - metal and fiber, for instance - that generate psychological and historical gravitas.

This is the essential magic of Chase-Riboud's work. For example, the sculptures are abstract, yet they're also humanist, a seeming contradiction.

The monument drawings, while somewhat symbolic, are less abstract but, as their titles - Monument to Oscar Wilde, Cardinal Ricci Monument - attest, more humanist. And the early drawings indicate that Chase-Riboud's art emerged from a connection to the earth and human experience; they're not pure fantasies.

Her life is inspirational and revealing of an attraction to art that began when she was a child taking classes at the Art Museum and the Fleisher Art Memorial. Success came early; the Museum of Modern Art bought one of her prints while she was still a student at Tyler School of Art, from which she graduated in 1956.

A fellowship sent her to Rome to study at the American Academy. She also traveled in Egypt and later, after marrying Magnum photographer Marc Riboud in 1961, in the Soviet Union and China.

Chase-Riboud began living in Paris in 1961 and, even after her divorce in 1980, has lived there since. She published her first book of poetry in 1974 and her acclaimed and somewhat controversial historical novel Sally Hemings in 1979.

From this cursory sampling of her CV one can appreciate that Chase-Riboud is an unusually well-rounded artist.

The sculptures at the heart of the Art Museum exhibition embody not only technical skill and sophisticated taste but also an admirable ability to blend contrasting qualities and attitudes. They effortlessly harmonize hard and soft, shiny and matte, smoothness and texture, fracturing and fluidity.

The basic dichotomy is the mating of intricately aggregated bronze "torsos" and sinuous bundles of knotted silk or wool, some as thick as telephone cables, that function as "skirts" hiding the armatures.

The bronze sections suggest weathered granite - a jumble of shards, nooks and crannies, and fanlike foldings. The skirts, knotted and looped, flow like waterfalls to the floor, where they pool.

Except for bilateral symmetry, the sculptures lack any intimation of anatomical features, yet they suggest human figures, in several cases monumental ones. The looming, jet-black Confessions for Myself, which is 10 feet tall, calls forth Darth Vader.

The sculptures come in two basic recipes - shiny, honey-colored bronze paired with champagne-colored silk, rayon, and cotton, and matte black bronze with black wool, sometimes accented with white. The odd man out is All That Rises Must Converge/Red, made of vibrant vermilion fibers anchored to red bronze the color of mahogany.

The pairing of metal and fiber might remind some viewers of African masks that similarly combine wood and raffia, but I don't find any evidence that Chase-Riboud has been influenced by African art. The looped, braided, and knotted skirts do owe a debt to the fiber artist Sheila Hicks, a longtime friend.

Although the sculptures are the headliners in this show, the drawings shouldn't be overlooked. The early ones in particular, which feature blocky boulderlike forms and elaborately folded cloths inspired by rumpled sheets, prefigure similar abstract aggregations and patterns in the sculptures.

Dubious deaccession. Six years ago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts sold one of the gems of its collection, The Cello Player by Thomas Eakins, to acquire a half-interest in a greater Eakins masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. That exchange raised eyebrows, even though by giving up a great work to save a greater one the academy was following established protocol.

Now it plans to sell one of its two Edward Hopper paintings, the only oils by that artist in public collections here, to buy - what, exactly?

Reportedly the Hopper market is hot. East Wind Over Weehawken is magnificent, and could bring as much as $28 million.

This time the academy isn't trading value for arguably greater value, it's buying millions of tickets for a lottery called the contemporary art market. The Hopper money would set up an endowment managed by a designated curator, who in turn would be advised on purchases by two trustees "knowledgeable in contemporary art."

But by "knowledgeable" does the academy mean people who know which current artists will turn out to be important and which will be also-rans? No such "experts" exist. Taste and standards continually shift; as a result, all museums own work by artists they are embarrassed to exhibit.

Cashing in a gilt-edged Hopper for a chance to patronize artists such as the Brooklynite who calls himself KAWS, whom the academy seems to favor, is just bonkers. You might call it a KAWS-tastrophe in the making.

The Barbara Chase-Riboud exhibition continues in the modern-contemporary wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through Jan. 20. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, to 8:45 Wednesdays and Fridays. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission: $20 general; $18 for 65 and older; $14 for students with valid ID and visitors 13 to 18. Information: 215-763-8100 or www.philamuseum.org