Judith Linhares

In the early 1970s, Linhares created narrative drawings and assemblages that appropriated commonplace or "craft" materials and feminine imagery (flowers, eggs, swan feathers, domestic scenes), pushing back against passé notions of "women's art."[6][35][36] Her "At Home in San Jose" drawing series was noted for startling, often humorous, imagery developed through introspection, which juxtaposed skeletons, devils and women in scenes of cozy domesticity or macabre religio-erotic fantasies.[37][31][9] San Francisco critic Alfred Frankenstein recognized them most for their "meticulous draftsmanship" and elegant design sense, calling her a successor to renowned Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada";[38][39] others compared their spiky, linearity and ghostly imagery to the work of Aubrey Beardsley.[4]

Linhares and critics, such as Dan Cameron, mark a four-month sojourn in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1976 as a turning point that refocused her on painting and integrated her subconscious imagery, painterly and narrative impulses, and Jungian, Surrealist, and Mexican and Outsider Art influences.[9][4][40][14] This evolution was perhaps first realized in the 1977 painting Turkey (featured in the "'Bad' Painting" show), which fused archetypal forces in an uncanny, iconic image.[4]

Judith Linhares, Woman with Beautiful Hair, 40"x 40", gouache on paper, 1985.

After her move to New York in 1980, Linhares's style and mastery of painting—particularly in gouache—gained momentum.[31][9][33] She developed a Symbolist allegorical world of enigmatic, bulbous-headed creatures, narcoleptic nudes, phantasms, figures in boats, and human metamorphosis, invoking dreams, myths and fairy-tales and existential, romantic and spiritual themes.[41][29][9][42] Her fantastic imagery was balanced by lush color, painterly sensual surfaces, and sure design, which critics maintained gave her vision its impact.[29][33][9][31] In paintings such as Woman with Beautiful Hair (1985) or The Beekeeper's Daughter (1990), Linhares began to focus more on single, usually female, figures in illusionistic space.[9] Through the 1990s, critics noted in her work a sunnier palette, increasingly abstract and ambiguous imagery, and a growing facility with a naïve drawing style that recalled the late work of Phillip Guston.[21][4][43][44]

In the 2000s, Linhares has turned to female nudes (often monumental), visionary landscapes, floral still lifes (e.g., Star Vase, 2003), and animals.[11][45] Critic Roberta Smith called the work her most assured,[2] while others suggested that Linhares breathed new life into seemingly exhausted genres.[22][46][1] These "deftly messy images of carefree, meaty stick figures"[1] and "fantastical tableaux" depict nude (or more aptly, nudist) women set against candy-striped skies and terrain—often free of men—picnicking, communing and working in a languid ease that suggests a lightly worn, but confident feminism.[47][48][49][50] John Yau described them as investigations of an alternative world, "Eden before the arrival of Adam and the snake."[14] Painted in bright Fauvist colors that critics described as juicy, madcap, and almost edible,[10][51][52] with blocky, charged, gestural brushstrokes, the paintings seemed to re-imagine de Kooning's violent nudes in an act of identification with the figures.[11]

Judith Linhares, Star Vase, 22" x 26", oil on linen, 2003.

In late works, from Starlight (2005) to Wave (2010, top) to Dig (2017), Linhares's commitment to the primacy of composition[35] came to the fore, as she pushed the limits of representation, perspective and coherence.[53][54] Writer Madison Smartt Bell (among many) identified "a solid integrity of composition that few latter-day figurative painters can rival, which he credited to Linhares's deep-rooted habit of beginning paintings with abstract fields of color, out of which she gradually pulls her subject.[12][4][13] Others have described her paintings as "single-image novellas" that "read with power and immediacy the way the great abstract paintings do."[55] Reviewing the 2006 show, "Rowing in Eden," Jennifer Riley wrote, "Shapes, figures, and colors are arranged like characters on a stage and painted with a deftness that makes this difficult-to-achieve work appear effortless."[22]

In 2019, Linhares appeared in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition "Contemporary Art: Five Propositions" and had a solo show, "Hearts on Fire," at P.P.O.W.[56][32] Reviewers noted that these later paintings—flowers, animals and nudes in landscapes emerging from bands of abstract color—created a fairy tale world that followed an internal logic and sense of randomness all its own.[23][32] They described the work, High Desert (2018), for example, as a brightly colored, visionary riff on Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy,[23] whose composition included a nude reclining on a crocheted, patchwork blanket, a watchful lion, and a Technicolor sky likened to "a deconstructed Sol LeWitt wall drawing."[32] The Sarasota Museum of Art exhibition "Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator" (2021) considered the intuitive process and creative inspirations shaping Linhares's practice, with a range of her own paintings, items from her studio including collected objects, photographs and journals, and works by five artists: Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson and Mary Jo Vath.[57][58]