LAURA MYNTTI

Trampling on Prudence

By Douglas Davis

1997

It is above all this reasonable modesty that has hitherto set the limits of feminine talent. Many women have avoided…

the traps of narcissism and false magic, but none have ever trampled on all prudence in the attempt to emerge

beyond the given world.

¾ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

(Paris, 1949)

In a well-thumbed copy of The Second Sex lying near her studio, Laura Myntti unconsciously provides a talisman for her rich, evolving work. Certainly she is trampling upon prudence by assailing the limitations of conventional modernist figuration and abstraction from her redoubt in remote Alaska. If narcissism means the healthy self-love once reserved for male assertiveness, she is openly narcissistic, often painting or referring to her considerable physical presence in both portraits and group studies. And her considerable "false" magic asserts itself defiantly, in darts and flashes, with primitive force, tricking the eye and mind with a bold guile that puts the very phrase trompe l’oeil to shame.

But has she found beneath this post-Beauvoir assault her "real" voice? There is no doubting her drive to speak to the world, rather than simply please or entertain. Yet Myntti’s voice is not monolithic. She offers a series of selves, each with a different pitch or intonation, to the world. There is the cool, worldly analyst of complex social and familial linkings, in the large serial multi-person studies (The Family, Love Quadrangle, Love Triangle, etc.). There is the unabashed indulgence of the body, in league with that wing of feminism that sees "liberation" in sensual rather than solely political terms: Venus with Fireweed (Homage to Botticelli) and Big Dinner openly declare this principle. There is the delicate designing eye, ready to feast on forms, textures, and colors, accepting a form of abstraction as its own end, and joy. Finally, there is Myntti-as-tragedian, ready to peer fearlessly into the dark, ugly recesses of the human psyche, surprising those who know her, who might assume that her voice will always be as radiant as her personality.

Myntti speaks in multiple voices, in other words. What she has to say to the world¾ the content driving her brush¾ is not simple. Which voice is the real voice? This is the question posed¾ and perhaps answered¾ in this essay.

MYNTTI ON HER OWN

Monsieur Manet has never wished to protect. On the contrary, the protest, which he never expected, has been directed against himself: this is because those who have been brought up in these /traditional/ principles will admit no others…

Before we seek the essential Myntti we need to consult the very history of art that she herself has consulted, as she has grown up or worked in a ring of cities and regions that stretches across most of the Western world. Though born in Minnesota, her formative years as student and artist unfolded in Moscow (Idaho), Boston, Paris, London, Helsinki, and New York. Along the way she moved precipitously from a commitment to architecture to drawing to painting. If at first she was captivated by figuration, she soon changed. She read and studied voraciously, focusing on Matisse and Van Gogh, on Kandinsky, Man Ray, and Max Beckmann. In Paris at the Sorbonne she studied French culture in its most advanced and contemporary phases and its existentialist theater. In New York and in London she touched contemporaneity, studying closely Roy Lichtenstein, Alice Neel, David Hockney, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Frankenthaler. In Helsinki she returned to her Finnish roots by investigating the softly soaring curves and nestled of the great Finnish builder, Alvar Aalto.

What emerged from all this was an acute self-consciousness, evident in every stroke she reveals to the public, that can only be called "Post-Modern." Myntti’s painterly passion for her subjects and her methods is always filtered through a clear awareness of who has come before her. Every time she addresses a nude body, a landscape, an arc of wallpaper, she has in her mind the artist who has visited here before, wielding some of the same skills, firing at some of the same targets. Undoubtedly she acknowledges them often in a comic vein. Often her surfaces are so flat, her patches of thick paint piled up so high, her cartoon characters so bold that they act as parody rather than feality. The originality she wrings out of this critical, skeptical awareness¾ at once the glory and the burden of painting at the end of this century¾ is an acutely seasoned originality. Perhaps post-modernism is modernism’s last, highly spiced afterthought.

But the panache she brings to this after-taste is precisely what lifts Myntti’s work out of the trough of appropriationism. It is her bold Beauvorian narcissism, her determination to "find her own unique voice" that enlivens the post-modern Myntti. So does the voice itself, which is capable of singing cantatas, oratorios, the blues, and seductive torch songs, depending on the occasion. Where her voice will end, indeed, where it is now, is our quest.

M. Manet raised similar questions in 1867, when he printed his own catalogue, authored his own essay, and rented his own gallery space to show his wares. I see Myntti waging a different but similar war with similar tools based in another gender and another time. She, too, is not interested in provocation; on the other hand, she does not shy from giving offense, where she must.

The one signal difference in this analogy then and now, between the magnificent Manet and the magnificently evolving Myntti is provided by us, her audience. We are virtually post-post-modern in our sophistication. No one dared to predict in 1867 where Manet would end. More than 100 years later, and smarter, or rather, less circumspect, we can attempt this impossible feat for the woman who is now under our microscope.

MYNTTI AS ANALYST

Philosophy… is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

Myntti recalls that she was attracted to the tortured affair between Anais Nin and Henry Miller in Paris in the 30’s because it was intensely mercurial, ranging from adoration to hatred to indifference. Anais and Henry (Anais Nin 1903-1977) is therefore a painting charged with the complex tension that attends so many human relationships¾ and rarely surfaces in painting. But the past five years has seen Myntti returning again and again to this complexity in a series of canvases devoted to "The Party," (series) to "Love Triangle" and, indeed "¾ Quadrangles." Inevitably, she also limns the "Marriage" series and "The Family." Taken collectively, these serial works raise the pitch of her skills and her work to a distinctively different plateau.

Often these paintings offer a memorable face in the foreground that summarizes or comments upon the mood elsewhere expressed in crowded backgrounds brimming with color and life. The Party (1996) presents a bleached-gold woman in profile, pinned down with an obligatory smile, anchoring a tableau of forced gaiety. In The Party (No. 3: Bad News) (1996), more forced gaiety, at the upper right, is edged with the anguished faces of the woman and man who dominate the story. Party No. 3’s "front plane" is squeezed with information, including the brilliant flat plane of the carpet supposedly beneath the heroine but in fact her equal¾ in nearly all of Myntti’s complex dramas, what might be called the "decoration," or purely formal composition, is an active, working character. Despite the mischievous smile of the victorious woman in the center of Love Triangle (1996), for example, embracing a man while her deserted lover, red shame (or anger) stamped on his face, the eye of the viewer gorges on the wall paper pattern that seems to knife through the middle of the embracing couple.

In all of these group studies, Myntti is linking deep, dark forces with the pretenses imposed by our social structures. The "Marriage" paintings often focus on the most ambivalent and uncomfortable moments common to any coupling: in Marriage No. 3 (1995), we see a man and a woman outlined in the light of an open doorway clutching each other, clearly tense, perhaps during or concluding a dispute. Marriage (No. 7) (1996) offers us a battered wife in the foreground, her eyes lined with deep circles of red and blue, while her husband relaxes in supreme indifference in the background.

As Robert Venturi’s architecture and criticism signaled a move in the 60’s away from the arrogant simplicity of the late modern movement, in which the glorious contradictions of our real lives is brutally ignored, Myntti’s group studies evidence a fresh willingness to confront what seems to be troubling us as the century ends. That she does so in a supremely painterly mode, often gesturing to esthetic precedent, is yet another sign of her post-modern tension. In Sisters (1996) we are offered another seductive carpet and set of characters: three exquisite sisters, one in a slinking formal robe, one in totally informal lingerie, a third looming outside a sliding glass door behind the couch pounding to enter, in a blue bath robe. The male on the front plane, though in front, is the least important dramatis personae here, as the painting is primarily about the competition between these three women.

Indeed it is the way in which content is asserting final and difficult control that transforms these contradictory studies of men and women interacting with each other. Jammed as they are with piles of paint and striking formal links between tones of color and flat, intersecting lines, they still speak to us of stories rather than images alone. Even when we are forced to invent the stories, as in The Family (No. 2) (1996) of The Family (1996), we tell the tale to ourselves, as the artist surely intends. She gives us a magnificent dominating face in the former canvas, of a haughty, dark-haired woman, while in the second we are handed no more than a cropped male in the foreground, whose truncated torment is simply suggested by his dark, hulking presence, and the two distant figures, one a mother speaking (no one listening), one a half naked man (brother, son, uncle) burying his head against a wall.

Yet both paintings, in the manner of this new mode in Myntti’s work, imply worlds of action and belief far beyond the bravura of pure paint. Often these implications are decidedly provocative. The Men Behind Every Woman (1990-1-2) which took three years to finish, lines up a series of males in dress suits behind a woman who is herself suited, though splattered all over with vibrant red dots. Though it’s tempting to "read" this work in conventional feminist terms¾ as a reversal of the cant phrase "the woman behind every man" ¾ the temptation has to be resisted. The face of the woman in front radiates confusion and introspection, not triumph, anger or dominance.

Is Myntti here in these challenging group studies acting as our analyst, in the mid-90’s, moving toward an analysis of our anguish? Each viewer must decide that question for himself/herself, sleuthing out the myriad nuances and subtleties that reward prolonged inspection. But I prefer to see them as delicately poised questions, rather than answers. She is only our analyst in the sense that she opens us up – to the crisis.

Myntti as Pagan Feminist

Sexuality is at the moment a comparatively open subject in a world dense with domination, despite the forces seeking to close the conversation down. It is an area for play, for experimentation, a place to test what the possibilities might be for an erotic life and a social world that would answer our desires…

In one sense, Myntti had to pay homage to Botticelli in Venus with Fire Weed (1995). The necessity is based not only on her love of the master, whose nude on the half shell she has adored and studied in the Uffizi. In her own work, Myntti has celebrated the body so often ¾ in the largest and in the most specific sense (her own body, those of her friends, and her models) ¾ that Botticelli demands her feality.

In any case, it is surely Myntti herself who sails here at the edge of a shore festooned with the native Alaskan weed. But she has been sailing in a sense all her life. Like Linda Williams, Marcia Palley, Alice Neel, and a host of other discreetly paganized feminist critics-artists-writers Myntti loves the body as well as all of its sensual implications, which her art both indulges and critiques. And she welcomes these traits in her friends as well as herself and the artists she admires, like Botticelli. In Yogacious Jeu, (1995) for example, she lavishly praises her friend, Judith Hoersting, an Alaskan painter, who is portrayed here in starkly celebratory tones, hands outstretched (as though describing wild adventures she is about to take on), bright reddish-blonde hair pitted against the deep dark blue tones of the forest.

In The Second Sex, indeed, Simone de Beauvoir, called for just such a liberation of female sexuality. While she clearly understood that the male’s readiness to respond to the promptings of desire was the gift of social nurture as well as instinct (men were encouraged from birth to express this need, she pointed out, women were not), she clearly preferred it. The true moment of liberation for women would be the moment when they could act openly on their own particular desires, rather than repress them, or wait for a male to turn the tap. Too often women employ sex-as-power rather than sex-as-end-in-itself, she noted. The same is true for the painterly body, which deserves a place¾ not banishment¾ in the new art produced by women whose open, relaxed manner in this regard can only be called post-feminist.

Now Myntti’s bodies, like her faces and her richly embroidered carpets, often play secondary roles in larger dramatic schemes.

The lead figure in Frank’s Waiting (1990) is defiantly bare-chested but focusing on a reverie that has nothing to do with the tine male waiting for her in the rear of the room. The same is true for Fantasy Lounging (1990-1-2), where another woman dreams of the "Grand Tetons" in Montana, (ironically given that name by French explorers who considered them as literal "great breasts"), while other women sprawl beyond her in the nude. And there are a series of Myntti portraits that catch her models in semi-undress, (Leif’s Niece Tanya, On the Road, I’d Rather Be Talking to You), where the body is a subdued, if always striking presence. But more often than not Myntti proclaims the body with flamboyance, not reticence. In Dionysus Wannabees (1990-1-2), she sends a headless torso flying up the gilded steps into what appears to be an open, waiting house. In a magnificently large painting, Big Dinner (1989), she deposits a long, satiated woman in front of a larger hotel window, all clothing gone. She lies there in supreme indifference, enjoying herself and her situation, as if scripted by The Second Sex, inviting the eyes of the world beyond. If Myntti’s voice is analytical, it is also joyous and paganized, inviting the viewer to think of the female as an active agent in more than simply social, economic, and political equality but sensual democracy as well.

Myntti as Tragedian

Indulge in your subconscious, or intoxicate yourself with wine, for all I care, love the dance, love joy and melancholy, and even death!

She produced a small painting in 1996 after only two days of fretting and wrestling. Its title is Psycho and it reveals a dark, tortured face at the bottom of an old staircase. I asked Myntti if the face was her. "No, no," she said. "I just felt like that."

So do we, when we view Psycho, and when we view a host of Myntti’s paintings¾ More Bad News, say, Stealth Bomber, American Farmer, or Gangster in the Bath. We can even sense it playing around the edges of the portraits she paints of beloved friends and acquaintances, often on commission. Like one of her idols, Max Beckmann, Myntti is incapable of ignoring the tragic side of life. She even appears in fact to relish it from time to time, to salute the dark, like a glass of wine.

American Farmer (1990) is a celebration of painting in its thick, piled red texture at the same time it levels the coarseness and brutality of its subject (some farmers were destroying their produce in the year she chose to paint this, in order to maintain a price level, despite widespread hunger abroad, and nearby). Gangster in the Bath (1991-2) is a winsome, half-comic presentation of the villain, despite the darkness that shrouds him. And Stealth Bomber (1991) only unfolds its horror on close inspection: if we missed its content we might see it simply as an elegant mixing of thick blue, white, green, and magenta forms, at play with each other.

But in pictures like Psycho, She’s New (1996), and More Bad News (1996), we are close to the "death" that Beckmann recommended, as is all of our lives. In She’s New, (1996) a diminutive woman sits surrounded by massive chunks of furniture, at once dwarfed by them and by her own long shadow. In More Bad News, one agonized woman’s face at the bottom of the frame echoes the humped despair of the man at the top. It’s impossible to leave these works without a clear sense of life’s tragic dimension¾ the dimension most American artists (and political leaders) choose to ignore.

If this vein in her work betrays something of Myntti’s obvious debts to Expressionism and to artists like Francis Bacon, the trust is clearer still in her portraits. From the dark, truncated portrait of her husband, Leif (No. 1) (1988), to the most recent studies, including even the sympathetic renderings of Susan Knowles (1995) and Louise Taylor-Strachan (1992), there is always some form of allusion to stress or friction.

In nearly all of the portraits, the focus is close-up on the face, sparing no blemishes. Often indeed the face is piled heavy with layers of darkly-outlined paint, as if Myntti is determined above all to avoid glamorizing her subjects, even when they commission her. In fact she insists on digging beneath their presented surfaces, demanding from each of them a box filled with private mementos and clues to the inner self.

Certainly the results are profoundly enigmatic. Leif’s early portrait is so dark and slashed that it is frightening. Susan Knowles’ self is at once forced and ingratiating, as though the owner of the smile feels she is called upon to provide it. Louise Taylor-Strachan sets her lips in a defiant, determined lock, as though she has miles to go to gain control of her life.

Not a one of Myntti’s subjects seems content with his or her place in life. On the other hand, each one of them seems supremely alive, or, as Generation X often says, "real." By tapping into the rarely mined lode of tragedy in our lives, Myntti has moved her own art of portraiture¾ and ours¾ to a new rise.

Myntti: All VoiceS (For All Seasons)

If this (book) is ever published, the feminine point of view will be established more clearly.

Anais Nin, Delta of Venus (Harcourt, Brace, 1969)

In an attempt to answer the questions provoked by Myntti’s work¾ and raised in the beginning of this essay¾ I considered resting our case on one of several works pregnant with autobiographical meaning. They included of course Anais and Henry (1990) where the supremely self-confident Anais smokes a cigar, wafting the column of smoke into the flat space of the painting where it takes on the potency of a knife. The Alter Ego (1991) sitting at the bottom of the stairs, her figure subdivided into a diverse array of colors, raises the issue of Myntti’s many, often conflicting voices. And The Telephone (1991), where a joyfully nude profile of a woman resembling the artist sits, smoking and waiting, seemed to raise the question of her multiple presence as well, expecting resolution.

But no, none of them seemed to resolve our needs, or Myntti’s. Closer to the point is Stefania (1991), in which a sober and lonely woman sits before a boiling fire, night inside, facing up to her solitary role in life, if not art. This, too, brings us closer to a form of clarity about the artist’s protean role as she launches the beginning of her mid-career life.

Finally, however, I settled upon a magnificent work executed in 1991-2 that I can only call a form of self-portrait. Entitled Self with Two Islands and Furniture, it brings us about as close as we can get to the artist’s real self, purpose, and future. It also offers a token of sorts¾ defining her "real" voice. First, the slightly cropped face staring at us in Self resembles the artist. Second, she stares at us directly here, unashamedly, but with decided clarity of vision: in brief, she is magnetized by us. She wants to see more of us, know more about us. These are the eyes¾ and the voice¾ of an artist who finds no end of freshness and surprise in the world. I vividly recall this poised intensity from my first meeting with Myntti and her work in Alaska, ten years ago. It is still here. As impudent as she is, in brief, she is also reverent, about what she sees, which is why she is doomed to speak to us in many voices.

Behind her, the islands and the furniture float in a mysterious void, at one with the figure. This is no "real" world here in the conventional sense. In a higher sense, of course, it is a realer than real: it is magic. Call it false magic if you will, but this requires us to give credit to the magician that created it. Think then of Myntti as a magician, here to transform the world and the rest of us, her subjects.

Douglas Davis is a writer and artist living in New York. He wrote about art, photography and architecture for Newsweek and the New York Times for 18 years. He has published books on art theory and architecture and has written, and writes for Art in America and Art Forum.