Art: Dramatic drawings need not defer

In the hierarchy of art media, painting traditionally trumps drawing, which was for centuries a means of capturing impressions and testing compositional ideas. This is no longer true, nor, as far as I can tell, has it ever been so for Sidney Goodman.

One of Philadelphia's most successful, respected, and influential artists, the 73-year-old Goodman has always drawn prolifically, and has always invested as much energy, intellect, and emotion in his major drawings as he does in his paintings.

It's significant, for instance, that more than 40 percent of the works in his 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were drawings.

Now the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Goodman has taught since 1978, has put up a show of 64 drawings and watercolors made over the last 30 years.

Selected by Julien Robson, curator of contemporary art, the show delivers the equivalent power and complexity of the 1996 retrospective. If you haven't seen any other show of Goodman's art, "Man in the Mirror" puts you dead center in his world.

(The Goodman show is half of a concurrent pair of PAFA retrospectives featuring longtime academy instructors who are among the city's artistic elite. The other features painter Elizabeth Osborne. A commentary on her show, "The Color of Light," will appear July 19.)

Goodman is a figurative artist, but not necessarily a realist. He is as much concerned with what visual representation can't reveal as he is with what registers on the retina. Both his paintings - some of these are on view at Seraphin Gallery through July 28 - and his drawings typically address intangibles such as states of mind, emotions, dreams, and fantasies.

Ambiguity and duality are his bywords. Many drawings suggest more than one interpretation, which can be maddening for viewers who expect an image composed of recognizable forms to make complete sense. Even Goodman's portraits of his immediate family, perhaps the most conventional pictures in the show, suggest layers of meaning beyond documentation.

Add to that the fact that Goodman is relentless in exposing human foibles, fears, failings, and barbarities, even his own. His drawings can be rough going for the squeamish because gratuitous violence and its consequences are a common theme.

Some drawings are bluntly and even grotesquely erotic (Urban Lovers, Bodies in Motion, Love Knot) and others, particularly Birth Control and The Struggle, are violently confrontational.

Goodman isn't all hard knocks and rough edges; his drawings of his wife, Pam, and his three children, Luke, Maia, and Amanda, and of his late mother expose his tender side. He's not sentimental, but he's consistently capable of touching intimacy.

He draws with vigorous, sweeping strokes, usually in charcoal, which produces heavy black outlines and dense passages of shadow. Darkness dominates, for instance, in Urban Lovers and Child Near Source, which depicts a young Luke standing next to a large tree. In this, the area of penumbral darkness is relieved, and dramatized, by a bright blaze of sunlight on the tree trunk.

In some drawings, the stark heaviness is counterpointed by blushes of lush color, usually a shade of red or red-orange, rendered in pastels. The color sometimes represents blood, as in Bloody Head With Fist, but more often it provides feminizing counterpoint, especially when used to highlight skin.

The most notable example is Night Vision, in which a dormant female nude is juxtaposed against the ominous, writhing coils of what might be a giant serpent.

Such striking contrasts are common in Goodman's drawings. He has expressed a fascination with light effects, but it's also possible that the near-absence of light stands metaphorically for those truths about human behavior and the psyche that evade direct observation. This tension between what can be seen and what can only be imagined constitutes the foundation of Goodman's art.

He composes with three basic ingredients - observation, readily recognized in images of his children; memory; and imagination. The last sometimes takes the form of implausible or humorous fantasy - Goodman self-portrayed in a boxer's stance while balancing himself on a large ball, or Goodman leering at three tiny Wonder Woman dolls.

The ball image could be a comment on the precariousness of life itself, an eternal balancing act, or on the way artists, especially this artist, struggle to reconcile the demands of art-making and truth-telling with being a father and husband, with being honest in art and in life.

Goodman is a severe judge of human nature; he's particularly censorious of the mindless violence so prevalent in American cities, the gratuitous brutality that keeps tabloid newspapers and the 6 o'clock news in business. He doesn't spare himself this scrutiny, he doesn't stand apart from the passing parade of hapless humanity beset by doubt, immobilized by fear, or derailed by passion.

These conditions are usually conveyed by symbols such as the serpentlike coils reminiscent of the famous classical sculpture the Laocoön Group; by large spheres, which surround and support a young Luke in Birthday, and which suggest instability or uncertainty; and by scenes of violence or chaos.

In its gravity and its unsparing emotional intensity, Goodman's art revivifies late 19th-century symbolism while obliquely recalling the demonic power of Francisco Goya in his Disasters of War suite and also, to a lesser extent, in Los Caprichos. Goodman's drawings are essence, not entertainment or diversion. They're more often disturbing than soothing. They might give you bad dreams, but they will also expand your consciousness.

Paintings at Seraphin. The current Goodman show at Seraphin Gallery of nine oils, two drawings, and a lithograph helps to put the academy exhibition in context. The paintings depict images of destruction, chaos, anxiety, confinement, rage and struggle, all encoded symbolically.

Like the drawings, the paintings tend to be muscular, both in the way they're brushed and in the contorted features of some of the protagonists, especially two men climbing opposite sides of a pinnacle. Even son Luke is shown encoiled, like Laocoön and his sons, in yellow plastic caution tape.

But in one corner of the gallery, gentility and repose assert themselves in an unusual sleeping nude. The model, apparently Goodman's wife, is bifurcated. Her torso and legs occupy the top portion of the canvas, while her head and shoulders anchor the bottom, like a magician's partner sawn in half. In this case, the parts are more intriguing than the whole.

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