Contemplating Cleary at Edison Place

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 13, 2006

It isn't often -- or, I should say, it isn't often enough -- that the contributions of longtime Washington artists are recognized with the kind of thoughtful retrospective treatment being given the career of William Christenberry at the Smithsonian American Art Museum or, last year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, to that of Sam Gilliam. That's why "Manon Cleary: A Retrospective" -- an exhibition of more than 60 works spanning nearly 40 years organized by the Washington Arts Museum at Edison Place Gallery -- is such a rare treat. More typically, we're used to seeing a year or two's worth of recent output in a narrowly focused gallery setting.

Is "Manon Cleary" all that one could hope for from a long, backward glance at the art of a woman widely acknowledged to be among the best, if not the best, of the city's figurative painters? Perhaps not, with its notable omission of, for example, Cleary's well-known series of paintings of male anatomy. Given the constraints of the space, however, curator Jean Lawlor Cohen's decision to go more family-friendly is hardly incomprehensible.

Despite being a surprisingly handsome gallery, Edison Place, part of the downtown Pepco building, is still the ground floor of an office building. That's not to say that the show is free of disturbing imagery. Aside from several classically rendered nude self-portraits, the show includes an entire room devoted to Cleary's iconic, and somewhat obsessional, paintings of white rats (both the laboratory variety, complete with unicorn-like drug ports protruding from their foreheads, and family pets). Other showstoppers include examples from Cleary's "Rape Series," a group of pictures depicting the artist's terrorized face, in an attempt to memorialize, or otherwise process, the emotions brought on by a sexual assault in the 1990s. Those canvases have been distressed with nails, fake wounds and claw marks.

What discomforts most, though, is not subject matter, but the quality of the artist's close looking. Whether Cleary is showing us lushly sexualized flowers (another hallmark), rodents, cloud studies or -- more recently with her "Breathless" series, acknowledging her chronic lung disease -- her own face and breathing tube pressed up against the glass of a photocopier, there is a tension between the cool, clinical detachment of photography and painting's warm idealization of form.

It rubs, like a grain of sand, against our notion of what's worth contemplating. Over time, as with pearls, that slight irritation has proved capable of forming great beauty.