Kyle Staver: History Painting in the 21st Century

If Kyle Staver had been born in the 18^th century, she might have been one of the era’s very few significant women artists, a colleague of Angelica Kauffmann or Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Yet unlike them, Staver would not have been content to remain a painter of portraits, even a successful one. She would have aspired to recognition as a history painter—the official Academy’s most exalted category—specializing in large-scale figures enacting scenes from mythology, the Bible, or the ancient past. Of course, Staver might have been less ambitious at the start of her career and started with more modest, genre subjects, establishing herself as a maker of images of everyday events before tackling the triumphs, loves, and foibles of the gods.

In fact, Staver’s evolution as an artist has followed this hypothetical path, in present day terms. Born and raised in Minnesota, she has lived in New York since receiving an MFA in painting from Yale University, College of Art, in 1987. For some years, her works were essentially modern genre paintings: bold, broadly painted images of casually dressed people and the occasional nude in everyday situations. There were mustachioed bikers and their chicks caught at unexpected angles; couples in moments of domestic intimacy, bathing, breakfasting, or tending to pets; and scenes derived from her Minnesota childhood, including a knockout painting of nude men collecting snapping turtles. Everything—figures, motorcycles, dogs, cats, and furniture—was conjured up with ample sweeps of the brush and abrupt shifts of scale that collapsed space to suggest a kind of photographic immediacy.

Over the intervening years, Staver has abandoned the quotidian in favor of wholly personal, quirky interpretations of classical myths, fearlessly tackling subjects the most conventional academician might have once addressed, with an engaging combination of utter seriousness, irreverence, and playfulness. The Minnesota images were usually ambiguous, despite the specificity of their motifs—just what were those men doing with those turtles?—while her mythological pictures usually focus on a defining moment: Daphne, already a rooted trunk, leaves sprouting from her fingers; Andromeda snatched from her rock by Perseus, mounted on Pegasus; a zaftig, sinuous Europa, perched on the back of Zeus, in the form of the bull who abducted her, swimming away from Crete while flying fish prudently get out of the way. Most recently, the narratives have become less explicit, but no less absorbing. We search our memories for the story, following the visual clues Staver gives us, without success, and then capitulate to the pleasure of her birds in flight, floating figures, and leaping fish, images somehow at once exhilarating and, sometimes, slightly ominous.

Staver’s implied narratives manage to hint at large chunks of the Western painting tradition of classical subjects, from Titian’s poesie to Delacroix’s fierce Medea, but their no-holds-barred compositions and unexpected viewpoints make clear their firm, Modernist, abstract underpinnings. They are also slightly comical—which is not to suggest that they are ironic or salted with self-conscious anachronisms. Staver’s drawing can verge on sophisticated cartooning, yet she tackles her equivocal subject matter with such conviction and intensity that her tongue-in-cheek wit reads simply as evidence of the contemporaneousness of her approach. She approaches her time-honored, much-explored themes with a refreshing lack of inhibition, an audacity embodied by her increasingly suave handling of paint and increasingly dramatic light effects.

Staver is also an accomplished print-maker whose work in black and white parallels her paintings. Remaining faithful to whatever themes currently preoccupy her on canvas, she uses the fluid lines and rich tonal palette of etching to find ways of telling her stories even more economically. Her pared-down, vigorous etchings are as energetic and as theatrically lit as her canvases, but their narratives are presented at a more intimate scale and with more delicate gestures of the hand. Yet another side of Staver has only recently been revealed. She has long modeled reliefs of her compositions as a way of studying the effects of light on forms—Nicolas Poussin is...