Judy Chicago
American, b. 1939
Three Faces of Man, 1985, from PowerPlay
Sprayed acrylic and oil on linen
54 × 108 inches
I saw this large set of three paintings today on my first visit, along with Aaron and Carla, to the new Palmer Museum of Art. It isn’t the first time I’d seen the work, but it is the first time the work arrested me. The artist apparently means it as a comment on the limited yet borderline violent range of emotions she sees 20th-century men as constrained to display. And while I applaud her comment (and doubly applaud her application of it to the Kavanaugh hearings), that’s not how I took it. Instead, it halted me as depicting the almost sublime power of very expressive emotion. I sympathized with its intensity. While I’m not known for big emotions, I am often, as my daughter has put it, “too facey;” that is, I am known for having an intensely expressive face. And I even feel like I hold back! I often wish I could be more freely intense in my facial and verbal expression without intimidating others.
Maybe that makes me the very man upon which Chicago is commenting.
Less weightily, I also found the work to be cause for celebration because, me being a sometime dabbler in theatre, I see in it a charmingly intense variation on Sock and Buskin. 🎨
