Moments of Loneliness

When Ruth Gikow decided to study art at Manhattan's Cooper Union 29 years ago, she had one goal in mind: "I wanted to do commercial art and make a lot of money so I could have a French maid." Today, Ruth Gikow, who is the wife of Painter Jack Levine, still has no French maid, but the sacrifice has not been in vain. Last week 26 of her paintings were on view at Manhattan's Nordness Gallery--forthrightly figurative works that mostly seemed as personal as pages from a diary.

Ruth Gikow is the daughter of a Ukrainian photographer who took his family west shortly after the Soviet revolution. The family roamed about Europe for a while, spent a year at a gypsy camp outside Bucharest, finally settled down on New York's Lower East Side--where it is natural for an imaginative girl to long for a French maid.

The Ear & the Nose. At Cooper Union, she studied under Regionalist John Steuart Curry, but learned most from the Union's director, Austin Purves, a painter who is now almost forgotten. Purves insisted that the ear and the nose, and not the eye alone, were important to the artist, so he would bundle his students off to Klein's department store or the Fulton fish market "to paint things we could smell." Ruth hated it; she wanted to be a fashion artist. One day at Central Park zoo, a fellow student drew an animal with a moving expression of fear that in an instant turned Ruth Gikow from aspiring commercial artist to aspiring fine artist. The new goal was elusive. She turned from social realism to semi-abstractionism, but she still felt restive. "It seemed as if everything I was doing was a fac,ade, too decorative and too much on the surface. I wanted to get underneath things, to be more involved with individuals, and to get away from facelessness."

But Painter Gikow never works from a model. When she did in the early days, she found that she was so afraid of hurting the model's feelings that the truth was never there. Instead, she works from memory, using oil so thinned by turpentine that her canvases seem almost fluid. Her blurred edges perform a double duty. They not only make the figure seem able to move, but they also bathe it in the timeless haze of things seen long ago and never forgotten.

The Caught Individual. An intense, brown-eyed woman with an ever-ready wisecrack, Painter Gikow insists that all her friends think of her as "a clown." Like most clowns, she is a well of sadness. Though she can capture the mood of a city with brilliance--a grey and misty Paris, a self-consciously French Brussels, a stifled Madrid with skull eyes for windows--her chief subject is the individual caught in a moment of pain, passion or loneliness. In her Old Folks Home, which was inspired by a nursing home her 81-year-old father was once in, the old couples sit close together, but each person has withdrawn into a world of his own until the whole scene seems suffocated in silence. Her Kleptomaniac, which could so easily have turned out to be mere sentimentality, was inspired by something that happened when she was working years before in Woolworth's. A prim old lady was caught one day stealing a tiny bottle of cheap perfume. What Painter Gikow put on canvas after so many years was the look of sudden terror and humiliation on the face of a human being whose whole world has just crumbled.

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