Bearing Witness

by Gerald Haggerty

Richard Brown Lethem uses the formal aspects of picture making to map subjective terrain. Like Philip Guston, his art wrestles with social issues. One trait distinguishes Lethem from most Expressionists and the modernist mainstream: he is, at core, a religious painter.

As a practicing Quaker, the essential question for Lethem involves violence and the eternal riddle: do the ends ever justify the means. WOMEN AND THE GUN reveals the consequences of violent death by portraying a pair of grieving mothers. Punctuated by the white shapes of four funereal lilies, paint resembling oxygenated blood is splashed and scraped across the canvas to underscore the urgency of its message.

THE COMPASS OF DESIRE obliquely recounts a historical event in the small Missouri town of Lethem's birth --a tale of rape, murder and lynching that assumed the status of legend in his boyhood. The canvas depicts a gigantic man lurching across the foreground while a tiny figure flees in the distance. Between the pursuer and the pursued, we see a house that's dwarfed by a scarlet triangle inscribed with the words "FIRE SAIL." Here is the heartland -- the emotional heartland -- and the stuff of unforgettable dreams.

Throughout Lethem's work, ambiguous spatial relationships are a metaphor for moral dilemmas, a reminder that "fluctuating ground" may refer to ethical as well as pictorial concerns. WHILE THE WORKER SLEEPS, IT'S DOG EAT DOG shows us a tangle of human and canine limbs, snarling teeth and jagged gray shapes. The image too evokes an encounter with brute force, this time met on the moonlit streets of Brooklyn where artist and his standard poodle were attacked by a proverbial junkyard dog.

THE BEEKEEPER PANICS may be interpreted as a Quaker parable, a lesson in what NOT to do when faced with life's swarming dangers. Here as elsewhere Lethem posits a way to deal with violence besides meeting it in kind, which is to reveal its corrosive essence. Not given to high-toned sermonizing, his paintings are often tempered with wit. He bears witness to the ways in which art can persevere and prevail in our imperfect world. No small miracle, that.

--Gerard Haggerty, professor of art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and writer for ARTnews.