New Yorker Suzanne Scherer and Moscow-born Pavel Ouporov met at the Surikov Institute of the Russian Art Academy in 1989. Their collaborative art draws on a variety of influences, including icon painting, nineteenth-century Romanticism and Symbolism, and contemporary realism. Now professors at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where they teach printmaking, they employ different mediums in their own art—egg tempera, silverpoint, gold leaf, photography and video. In fall 2007 an exhibition of their multi-faceted work, “One Voice,” appeared at the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida. At a time when many figurative artists are wary of tackling mythic subjects, Scherer and Ouporov are committed to exploring archetypal iconography. What gives their work its contemporary edge is their interest in the technical possibilities of mixed media—they use Mylar and glass as supports as well as poplar—and sophisticated manipulations of different registers of representation.

In medieval times in Europe, bell founders were itinerant craftsmen who traveled from town to village stopping to ask local parishes if they needed any new bells. (In those days bells were the sound of living. They called us to prayer, sounded alarm in fire, war and flood, pealed for joy at weddings and births or passed the dead to rest.) If work was available, the bell founder set about to gather his material, digging clay to make the bell shape (cope) and core; he requisitioned horse hair, eggs and manure to mix in with the clay to reinforce and “open” it to create a material matrix that would not break yet “breathe” when the 2,000 Fahrenheit-degree metal flowed into it. He secured the bell metal (90% copper and 10% tin) and perhaps a secret amount of gold or silver, a wedding ring to sweeten the sound. Village women piled their worn out copper and tin ware as a tithe towards the bell’s realization, remembering later their broken pot became a sacred sound. The casting pit was dug where the bell maker made the pattern.

There is a specter haunting higher arts education today, and its name is rationalism. There are goblins, too: theory-driven art, lack of clarity in terminology and intention, hidden agendas in critiques, “de-skilling,” the manufacturing of young art stars, among others. James Elkins certainly has plenty of company¹ in which to raise doubts about the teaching of visual art. Allies include art historians and artists of stature, many of whom also teach. Dave Hickey, not a visual artist, but a professor of English literature, art criticism and theory,writes: “In the present moment, artists are better off training themselves at home and acquiring the benefits of a good liberal arts or art historical education.” But Judith Russi Kirshner observes: “Creativity flourishes when there is a critical mass of diverse individuals working side by side, often in an urban setting.” Could this apply, perhaps, either inside or outside an art school environment? “In art school, a student is likely to become a better artist sooner,” said Jack Tworkov, teaching in the 1950s at Yale. ² “Ultimately, the artist must transcend his teacher,” was the advice of Isamu Noguchi.³

In October at Jacob Collins’s splendid Grand Central Academy of Art, in New York City the Derriere Guard held its tenth anniversary festival. The Derriere Guard is a group of artists and writers in various genres and media—music, painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, the performing arts, etc.—committed to reforming and revitalizing aesthetic culture through recovery of the traditional forms and genres and concerns of the arts. The Derriere Guard is a vital representative of the movement sometimes called the New Classicism, led with wit, effervescence and energetic intelligence by the composer Stefania de Kenessey. One of the main areas of discussion at the festival was the challenge posed by the very successes of the movement. We had, we felt, definitely made an impact in the last ten years. The traditional crafts and techniques of the arts were back on the agenda. Artists need no longer apologize for making music with real melody, paintings and sculpture with recognizable subjects, poetry with rhyme, meter, and clear stories, plays in which the audience can engage with the feelings of the imagined characters, novels with discernible and suspense-filled plots, buildings with humane proportions, inviting ornament and intuitively oriented functional spaces.

In November Arcadia Gallery in New York City presented “Works in Progress: From 2001 through 2007,” an exhibition of Daniel Sprick’s lyrical yet unsettling interiors. An admirer of Van Eyck and Vermeer, Sprick uses light and shadow to suggest suspended time, but his stillness is too uncanny to be serene. His debt to seventeenth-century Dutch art is obvious, especially in the recurrence of vanitas objects such as flowers and skulls, although the mounted specimen of a skeleton with formidable talons in Bird in Landscape would look at home in a modern natural history museum. Sprick freely mixes in contemporary elements, modernist chrome chairs, for example, and picture windows opening onto the landscape outside his Colorado studio. His paintings have slightly unreal tonalities, deliberately achieved by manipulating the “warm primary light” from studio windows with “a cooler, secondary light source wrapping around the shadow sides of objects, reflected from a mirror.” The artist compares the effect to that created by theatrical gels, and his staging of still-life objects can be dramatic. In Memory Jar a small, high table, wrapped in white drapery, takes center stage. This makeshift altar is crowded with curiosities: a mirror to the outside world, various implements, a human skull and a beaded jar made by a friend.

Scott Fraser is a still-life painter of remarkable technical prowess. But, as a November exhibition of new work at J. Cacciola Gallery in New York City demonstrated, he can also be a visual comedian. Study in White seems to exist for the pure pleasure of arranging shapes and surfaces in aesthetically pleasing ways. Curved cups with fluting reminiscent of a classical column are laid out along the straight edge of a table. The distressed matte whitewash of the furniture contrasts with the soft sheen of ceramic. The brownish background throws the objects into relief like a cameo, in a still life as elegant as one by William Bailey. Shiny Things uses the same table and background, but the star is an old-fashioned dark metal scale, which weighs a bunch of Hersey’s kisses against the balloon of a popcorn shaker. The depiction of the silvery foil is particularly deft. The level of incongruity mounts in a series of natural history specimens displayed like hors d’oeuvres in Cracker Frog, Cracker Fish and Cracker Toad.

This handsome catalogue documents arecent exhibition of works by Milton Glaser, held at Piero della Francesco’s birthplace and coinciding with a show of Piero’s own work in Arezzo. A selection of Glaser’s well-known posters, silkscreens and lithographs was on view, along with two marvelous colored pencil artists’ portraits: De Chirico, seated in a characteristic metaphysical piazza, and Klimt, against a backdrop of nudes and flat decoration. But the heart of the event was a series of Piero-inspired watercolors, which Glaser has been making since 1989. Glaser has admired the early Italian Renaissance painters since his Fulbright year abroad, 1951–52, when he studied in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi. His approach to the quattrocento master evinces both humility and creative autonomy: “The world does not need bad copies of Piero’s work, and so the solution was to treat Piero as if he were nature itself.” Rather than revisiting entire compositions, Glaser isolates motifs and rearranges the elements, building on his half-century of experience as one of the world’s leading graphic designers.

Piero della Francesco, The Queen of Sheba’s Adoration of the Holy Wood (detail), Arezzo

Take, for example, his variations on Piero’s iconic twin portraits, Frederico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza. In several watercolors, the two are reunited in a single frame: back-to-back, Janus-style; facing each other and brought close together so their distinctive profiles jigsaw the sky behind them into interesting negative space; overlapping, facing the same way. In each case, Glaser has darkened Federico’s complexion to make a stronger contrast with Battista’s ivory skin. In the catalogue essay, “A Century-Old Passion: Piero della Francesca in America,” Luciano Cheles quotes the painter Joseph Stella on the remarkable profile of the Duchess of Urbino, “ its holy-wafer whiteness set into the blue background with diamond-like precision.” In one version, Glaser reduces Federico to mottled areas of brown, black and red, divided across four sheets. In another, a pair of portraits in soft grey-browns blurs the features of Duke and Duchess. Or Battista is shown alone, in vibrant pale greens and yellows, or under a blue-green aquatic veil, for a symbolist look. Glaser even inserts the face of Christ, from Piero’s The Resurrection, between Federico and Battista. A suite based on that face of Christ has the spontaneous intensity of Veronica’s miraculous veil, especially the way the artist works it out of wet-into-wet brown wash. Another detail from The Resurrection, the head of a sleeping soldier, yields two fine but different images. In one, a strong profile in brown wash is set off by the white saucer of the hat; in the other, the image is sketched out in a psychedelic rainbow of pastels.