DNA At Six
by William Corbett

There are at least two ways to run an art gallery. Pierre Matisse, son of Henri, ran his Manhattan gallery by showing a few artists,—Matisse péré, Miro, Balthus, Giacometti and Dubuffet first among them. They more or less swore fealty to one another for from ten to forty years. Matisse's way is almost certainly impossible today. The expansion of America's art world in the 1960s led to artists becoming free agents and galleries opening and closing as fast as boutiques. Today's art world is in constant flux, often compared to the stock market and, in black times, to Holland's 17th-century tulip market. Even Pierre Matisse himself might not be able to do today what he did from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The other way? DNA. Not the "two long chains of nucleotides twisted into a double helix" discovered by Watson and Crick some twenty-five years after Matisse began his gallery. But DNA as metaphor for our personal human uniqueness as manifest, in this case, by artists. Since DNA, the double helix, is where human genetic action resides, another metaphor suggests itself. DNA the gallery shows a broad range of artists whose various powers of imagination are part of our collective inheritance. The poet Elizabeth Bishop named this artistic inheritance,"the little of our earthy trust...our abidance."

Among the names this abidance carries at DNA are Gregory Amenoff, Dimitri Hadzi, Noa Hall, Karen Miller, Christopher Minot, Anna Poor, Daniel Ranalli, Francie Randolph, Jo Sandman, Dawn Southworth and Tabitha Vevers. At least these are some of the artists in what can loosely be described as the "Boston chain" in this DNA. They are as renowned as the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi and lesser known like the painters Christopher Minot and Tabitha Vevers. They are nearing the end of long, productive careers, busy in mid-career or just starting out. They make paintings, sculptures, photographs and objects that are not so easily classified and their work is figurative and abstract. In other words this "Boston chain" is composed of links shaped by each artist's peculiar vision just as are the other chains entwined at DNA.

Since I know best the work of the Cambridge-based Dimitri Hadzi and the former Boston painter Gregory Amenoff, by writing about that work in a little detail the range of DNA may be gauged.

Dimitri Hadzi is seventy-eight years old this year and his list of honors, awards, selected public collections, selected one man shows, group shows and commissions runs to two eye-fatiguing single-spaced pages. For many years he worked in Rome and since 1969, when he came to Harvard to teach, he has worked in Cambridge in steel and stone, on paper and on canvas. In Boston and Cambridge as in other cities across this country Hadzi's work is public. If you have shopped or strolled through Boston's Copley Place mall then you have probably paused before Hadzi's towering stone relief down which water flows into a pool of his design that is the focal point of the mall's courtyard where shoppers rest. The various stones, rough grained and smooth, colored tan, raw meat red, black and light orange, form a tower with a pyramid top. The water bathes them as if they are an upright stream bed. This work and the suave gray and pink sentinel that stands on the island at the confluence of streets in Harvard Square project the civic virtues of beauty for its own sake.
Over his long career Hadzi has worked in a large repertoire of 20th-century forms that he manipulated to his own ends. The same can be said of Gregory Amenoff, who has consciously come after the great homespun American modernists John Marin, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Marsden Hartley. Amenoff is essentially a painter of visionary landscapes. These are abstract in character because he has invented them out of memory and imagination. They are realistic because always present in them is nature, large as a mountain and small as a seed, and the weather we encounter in the world.

It is easy to imagine a Hadzi sculpture and an Amenoff painting keeping company at DNA but this is almost certainly not their main appeal for the gallery. Both Hadzi and Amenoff have restless hands and produce art in a number of mediums. In Hadzi's Cambridge studio his sculpture rooms lead to an office where, against a corner wall, he paints. The street entrance to his larger studio is through a dusty, windowless room where he draws and works on etchings and prints. When Amenoff isn't painting he works on drawings, watercolors, prints and woodcuts that draw from his muscular canvases the pure spirit animating his art. Hadzi and Amenoff are shown at DNA for the same reasons that the gallery's other artists are: their work is worthy and holds its own in the company of work by other artists. DNA functions partly, if not largely, through exploring affinities between artists who might not otherwise be caught dead together.

Cape Cod and preeminently Provincetown have welcomed American art in its many modes at least throughout this century. In my early teens an introduction to art came in the hardback magazine Horizon, something my father brought into the house and left unread. Idly I picked up an issue to find a photo spread on painters who summered on Cape Cod. I still recall the photographs of Edward Hopper and his wife, faces toward the setting sun outside their white clapboard house, of Franz Kline posed on a ladder in a barn looking down at one of his late colored abstractions with the barn door wide open to a vision of pure summer sunlight on leafy trees and of Edwin Dickinson, who became one of my favorite painters, in front of his gray shingled Wellfleet house, bearded like a New England patriarch and fierce eyed.

DNA keeps this variety alive—not that Hadzi, Amenoff or any of the other "Boston chain" pay any more than a visit to Provincetown to see how the gallery has displayed their work and to enjoy the local waters. It seems right to do this in a place where figures as various as Charles Hawthorne, Walter Chrysler, Hans Hoffman and Robert Motherwell have felt comfortable. It also seems right that DNA emphasizes a twist in its own genetic code by having a Sixth anniversary. No Fifth and Tenth, five and dime celebrations at DNA! Presumably an Eleventh anniversary will follow this, then a Seventeenth leading to the gallery's silver anniversary, the Twenty-eighth, at which whoever then constitutes the "Boston chain" will exhibit variations on the Paul Revere bowl.

William Corbett is a poet whose most recent collection is titled Boston Vermont (Zoland Books, 1999). He is a frequent contributor to artsMedia and Modern Painters.