LUCID DREAMING
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Noon 4, Lily Ente, marble, 49¾”x17¼”x18¾”, 1960

Late bloomers always give me hope. In contrast to the generally obnoxious, “look Ma no hands” quality of the child prodigy, those who find their métier late in life—often due to difficult life circumstances, lack of formal education, and so on—prove that it is possible to work toward a new goal, that the old dog really can learn new tricks, that maybe there’s still some small chance that the bolt of inspirational lightening can still strike, no matter how far along you are in life.

Such is the story of Lily Ente, whose work is on view in the Towbin Wing of the Woodstock Artists Association until January 7. As a teenager, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and periodic anti-Semitic pogroms, she emigrated with her Russian Jewish family, making lengthy stops in Bucharest, Paris and Cuba before finally being admitted to the United States in 1923.

While the exhibition catalogue essay attempts to make some tentative connections between Ente and her possible exposure to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi during her stay in Paris (given the formal similarities of some of her later work), little of substance is actually known about this period in her life, and it seems highly dubious to me to ascribe too much aesthetic influence at this particular juncture, long before she actually became a sculptor in her own right. Much later, when she became involved in the New York art scene in the 1940s and ’50s, she would have had plenty of opportunity to see work by Brancusi, not to mention all the other Parisian modernists of the first half of the century, at places like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and in various other gallery shows. It’s interesting to note that Ente herself played on this early Parisian experience as she entered the New York artworld, claiming that she had had formal artistic training in Paris—a claim the catalogue essay rightly dismisses as a fabrication that she must have felt necessary to advance her career as a professional artist.

The apparent reality of her life is this: she emigrated to America with her family; fell in love with another Jewish refugee on the way; later married him and moved to an apartment in the Bronx in the same complex as her family; bore a daughter; eventually became disenchanted with her life as a housewife; and then, in her late thirties, almost accidentally discovered her ultimate release in the joy of modeling clay, and later in carving wood and stone. This is decidedly not the traditional charmed narrative arc of the life of the “artist”. Artists are people of vision, people who enjoy playing with form and light and vision from an early age, and who doggedly pursue a path of creativity and risk in order to make this vision a reality. (And we musn’t forget the “poor and starving” part of this story.)
Ente’s life is a far cry from all of this. While her early life was indeed difficult (being a refugee is never an easy lot), these difficulties effectively cut her off from the social and material realities required to imagine oneself as an artist. Once settled in America, her family’s material fortunes turned up, and after she married, she settled into what was apparently a fairly comfortable life with her husband, and later, her daughter. Apparently this “happy ending” was not enough for her (should it really be for any of us?), but unfortunately the story of the unhappy housewife searching for a means of expression fails to conjure up the allure and mystery of artistic creation in the mythic dimension of the stereotypical story. She slips the bonds of time and influence, becoming, to paraphrase the latest Coen brothers’ film, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There.” As much as the catalogue text attempts to establish some sort of bona fide artistic paternity for her work—guessing at what she might have seen in Paris as a teenager, surmising the significance of English sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth on the development of her biomorphic abstraction—it remains a text liberally peppered with the word “likely”, demonstrating its ultimate inability to decisively rope in its subject, a woman who came to art late, settled into her work, and left little in the way of articulated artist’s statements or personal testimony to the specific influences on her art.

Of course, once she arrived on the New York art scene, it becomes obvious that she immediately picked up the exciting gist of that milieu, which in the years after World War II was picking up speed as the new international capital of the art world (having “stolen” that title from Paris). Like any number of other artists in the 1940s and ’50s, she begins with a variety of abstract-yet-representational works, ultimately moving in the direction of entirely abstract form. In the Woodstock show, it is interesting to observe her evolution as an artist, from the earlier wood carvings and pink alabaster works, to her fascination with the difficult-to-work black Belgian marble and its white Italian opposite. She is exceedingly sensitive to texture in all her work, and develops over time a real mastery of form and patina, causing light to pool and play across the surface of the stone. In most histories of this sort of abstract sculpture, one normally finds accounts of the differences between Henry Moore’s abstract, yet still recognizably figurative work and Barbara Hepworth’s cooler, somewhat geometricized work. Ente’s oeuvre presents yet another possibility, and an interesting contrast with Hepworth in particular—after abandoning the vestiges of figuration in the 1950s, Ente’s marbles seem far less intellectual, less inclined to find pure geometry, and much more likely to reveal odd concavities and strangely warped contours in the stone. Where Hepworth, while not following a rigidly geometric plan, still displays a fundamental understanding of the geometric relationship underlying each work, Ente by contrast seems to be looking at geometry through a fantastic funhouse mirror, usually departing from some initial geometric starting point (especially in her white marble slab works of the 1960s) to find a destination that has little to do with Hepworth’s more purely abstracted, intellectual approach.

In order to conduct your own mini-art historical tour of this genre of modernist sculpture, once you’ve visited the Ente exhibition in Woodstock, you should wend your way to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, where they have just received two works by Isamu Noguchi on long-term loan, now installed in and near the entrance to the museum. Noguchi’s connection to Brancusi—unlike Ente’s—is known and direct: he apprenticed with the modernist master, filtering Brancusi’s insight through the dual cultural screens of his own half-Japanese, half-American upbringing. Throw a little Surrealist influence into the mix, and you can see why he was one of the most successful sculptors of the mid-20th century. At times, the spirit of his work can seem quite close to that of Ente’s, but in the final analysis, hers remains a much more personal, intimate exploration of what just what lies in the heart of the stone.

“Lily Ente: Listening to the Stone,” on view through January 7 at the Woodstock Artists Association, 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock. 679-2940 or www.WoodstockArt.org.

Isamu Noguchi sculptures, on long-term loan at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie. 437-5632 or www.vasssun.vassar.edu/~fllac.