Inez Storer

by Jack Fischer

The Mercury News, October 26, 2003, Page 3E

Pictures, we like to think, should yield up their meanings easily -- at least pictures of the real world: flowers, animals, people, and the like.

So it can be a bit discomfiting when our expectation of such instant understanding is thwarted, as so often happens in the art of Inez Storer.

"Theatrical Realism: The Art of Inez Storer," a broad retrospective of this Northern Californian's prolific career, at Santa Clara University's de Saisset Museum through Dec. 7, suggests the ways that the objects in narrative painting can be cut loose from specific meanings to create allusive and visionary art.

The retrospective -- 40 paintings from 1960 to the present, as well as examples of the 71-year-old's artist books, prints and assemblages -- is part of a three-venue exploration. Early next month, the Gallery at Villa Montalvo will open "Inez Storer: Encore Narratives," a small show of her most recent work, while the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art will offer "The Legacy of Inez Storer," work by artists she has taught or influenced.

Together, the shows mark the first thorough look at the work of Storer, a presence in the Northern California art world since the late 1950's, when she was part of the scene at San Francisco's Six Gallery, the Beat hangout where Allen Ginsberg introduced his seminal poem of the era, "Howl." (She was in the crowd one of the nights when he read it there.)

But Storer's career soon took a different turn, away from the bohemian lives led by many artists of that place and time. By 1960, she had a husband and four children and had moved to Inverness, an hour north of San Francisco. Art, though never abandoned, was something she was obliged to squeeze in between other responsibilities.

Improbable personal history
It's a matter of more than just historical interest, because biography -- transformed by her hand into something a bit mystical and open-ended -- is central to Storer's art.

An inveterate scavenger, she combines old letters, bits of cloth, appropriated commercial imagery and stenciled text with the emotive fields of the colors of an abstract expressionist to explore her own improbable history. Her father was a German aviator and architect who fled Europe during the war to become an art director at a Hollywood studio. Add to that the fact that her mother, traumitized by the war, hid Storer's Jewish roots from her and raised her Roman Catholic, and you have a good measure of the personal fuel, and fascination with secrecy, that fire Storer's art.

A number of these elements come together in "Histories" (1997), where a blindfolded child kneels before a blood-red, easel-like altar that itself features a childlike figure. At the feet of that plausibly Catholic scene is a menorah. Flowers emanate, like feelings, from behind the kneeling figure's head. It's a rumination on the artist's own history, but it's also a broader story, of anyone who has fumbled to locate authentic experience within religious practices, as well as a rumination on the supplicatory nature of childhood, among other things.

Many of the paintings seem at first glance like allegory, but on closer inspection refuse to reveal such specific secrets. Storer's method is more like a vast filtering and sorting system, gathering resonant images, collating them through a feeling of pure longing, and reintroducing them to the world on a stage of lush paint.

She uses a faux naive figurative style to tell her reticent tales. Her people, often drawn like those in folk art, float in zero gravity, untethered to the real world and suspended in an indeterminate space that Storer conjures with a deft, atmospheric blending of cobalt blues or umbers. Angels, magicians and aviators float past, their often-adult concerns at odds with the childlike presentation. It seems Storer has concluded that the evocative way to recall the formative memories of childhood is in a child's own hand, an approach that reveals the surrealism that lies at childhood's core. Events from past and present combine on the canvases, just as they do in memory.

Three times an outsider
Despite the work's childlike trappings, Storer is no naif. She's studied art at San Francisco State University, the University of California-Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she worked under Nathan Oliveira, who seems to have been a noteworth influence. She also has taught widely.

Still, her concerns make her three times an outsider: one for being preoccupied with her own interior life in a time when much art is more focused on the external world, a second time for having worked in California during many years when New York ruled the art world and a third for being a female artist.

A thread of feminism is evident in such works as the artist's book "The Uneventful Life of Donna Carmen y Costanza" and such monoprints as "Woman at Work!" of a woman balanced on a tightrope. Storer is also a prolific printmaker, having worked for many years at Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto. An entire room of the de Saisset show is given over to that work.

The de Saisset missed in a bet in burying two of Storer's early works, "Piano" (1962) and "Only Family Portrait" (1959), in a basement gallery. The paintings, which show Storer struggling through the abstract expressionism of the day to find her own identity as an artist, would have made an enlightening introduction to the show, especially because they showcase the paint-handling skills that do so much to invigorate the more mature work.

Occasionally while walking through "Theatrical Realism," one might wish that Storer's paintings would move toward resolution. Many can seem inscrutable in the same way, through the juxtaposition of dimly related objects that the viewer is obliged to parse. The work can slo seem tamed by Storer's palpable desire to please the "audience," instead of sometimes pursuing a vision to its woolliest ends.

But neither observation negates Storer's sustained and inventive contribution to the art of Northern California, a contribution that is still, after 40 years, unfolding.