A Darker Shade of Brown

by Jim Feast

Think of the true present as a single, house-long room, its wooden structure containing knotholes above and below, chinks where elements of past and future leak in. Using this metaphor, we can see the painting of Richard Brown Lethem as determinedly widening these knotholes, preparing a double demolition, yanking up the floorboards, and ripping out the spines of the ceiling so his canvases ripple with three kinds of contorted light For it is his ambition to see into the split-level moment and "capture the specific quality of incident, gesture or moment in time.

Some of his paintings look honestly into our checkered past. Face it; a lot of American history is a nightmare. When Lethem remembers a Midwestern boyhood, as in ''The Falling Red Hat," it's not a picture of folksy merrymaking and corn husking in the manner of Thomas Hart Benton, but the portrayal of small town headsmen, scarface Babbits, filing past the coffin of the mutilated victim of a "lynching bee." When he looks further back, as in ''The B Ward" remembering the persecution of the Quakers (a group to which he belongs), there is a depiction of Cromwellian inquisitors, ghoulishly heating their torturer's branding iron for use on a religious dissident.

Nor has the American future often lived up to its claims. The dream has too often been sullied. With a dark, gravelly palette, as rawly and almost as grimly as in his paintings of history, Lethem depicts a hard-as-nails, but unstintingly hope-filled future. These could be the promise that our streets will crackle with positive energy, as in "Street Passing," for instance, where a drab urban crowd is lanced by an erotic prod between two sidelong heads. Or the promise that righteous causes will register deeply in our society, redeemed in "News of the civil War" that shows the yellow fmmed victims of death squad violence flashed over an abyss like screen.

Modern art movements have generally been one-way streets. Some like the Pre­Raphaelites (a movement to which Lethem's craftsmanship allieshim) dismissed perspective and looked to the integrity of the past; others, like Russian Constructivism (to which Lethem's strong sense of form ties him) revolved about the future. They sought sparks from their heritage or visions. But the painting closest to Lethem's heart, German Expressionism, with its naked, nearly unpalatable emotional fury, seems perversely rooted in the present. It is Lethem's self-appointed goal to open it out. To do this honestly, to strew all this on a canvas, all our unsettled debts to the past, all our unfinished hopes for a better time, is not easy. Nor is it easy for an artist to live aesthetically in what e might call a "rented" house, that is, one rent by shattered floors and smashed ceilings, thank god, Lethem had the clear-eyed temerity to move in.

Jim Feast
New York City, 2005