The Washington Post Saturday, April 11, 1995 by Lee Fleming Although Judy Moore’s show at Foundry has technical glitches — such as a swipe of yellow-pink that flattens the bridge of a child’s nose into a cheek — it’s still compelling. These large close-up portraits of her family demand attention. Not just because Moore uses a strong, colorful palette to express the emotional life of her subjects; she presents faces whose eyes look straight at us, as if daring us to understand their struggles and lives. Sometimes her reliance on color overwhelms the faces, as with “Minnie (The Rose of Dubuque),” (sic) whose brilliant green and purple skin makes it difficult to concentrate on her individuality. On the whole, though, Moore makes it work. “Hugo,” a young man with a pale green/flesh face under a slouched worker’s cap, is intelligent and memorable. And “Louisa,” with a vigorously brush-worked face half in shadow, casts a cool, doubtful eye. Art Papers July/August 1995 by George Howell Character, and the impenetrable distancing of self, is the overriding subject of Judy Moore’s paintings based on four generations of her family. Moore’s palette owes its feeling-tone to Fauvism, but her raw colors pulsate in hard, cold ways. Her portraits are neither expressionist nor neo-expressionist; they have the crushed sensibility of people trapped under the weight of history. For portraits based on family photographs, these heavily modeled acrylics are remarkably lacking in sentimentality, nostalgia, or kitsch. Moore’s figures sit in a paradoxical place — on canvases roughly 3.5’ square — and close-cropped like photographs, they have a physical immediacy that is countered by the cold glare of their gazes. Moore’s paint-by-numbers color treatment has a fragmented feel, like puzzle pieces that sometimes fit, but when they don’t, as in the flattened bridge of Robert’s nose, suggest how personality is constructed out of bits and pieces of data we cannot always synthesize into a whole self. Likewise, the man’s expression is typical of Moore. Is he wincing in remembered pain, or slyly smiling at a sudden recollection? Indeed, the raw reflected light on his face — harsh ochre and bronze — implies that the grimness of Moore’s subjects comes from staring unflinchingly into some cataclysmic event, a fire just outside the picture space, or the firestorm of history. Moore’s subjects have the look of immigrants, a European family relocated to a new world that may not want it. Her family came from Germany, and settled in small farming towns in Texas during the 1840’s and 1850’s. There is an aura of historical momentum weighing these faces down in a way we normally don’t associate with portraiture. By basing her work on the family photo record, Moore does a curious thing with historical time — you can’t tell the specific era of any portrait. While the clothing is sometimes a giveaway, the severe immediacy of these portraits cuts away any nostalgia, curiosity, or wishful thinking we usually load onto images of the past. Instead, the grievances and anxieties of the past are made contemporaneous and present. This is particularly striking in her children’s portraits. All of these children appear sad, bruised, crushed by fate, as though the story of their adult sorrows is written like premonitions across their faces. Elvira is the powerful study of a pouty, fretful adult shrunken down to child’s size. The purplish shaded zones of her face, accented by lime greens, pull the face back into a dark mood that belies the summery brightness of her yellow dress. Stacks of copperish orange create a mound of hair like hay smoldering and ready to ignite. It is as though Moore, looking back on the life history of this child, has written its course across her face. Moore’s treatment of clothing allows her to indulge in the painterly pleasure of abstraction, a style she explored in earlier work. In Roland, she paints a beautiful scarf/collar, a field of whites, grayish and subtly mixed with blues and violets, placed below the child’s face, which is mutely curious and reserved like a puppet boy. The plain collar is a snowy setting for innocence subverted by the cold blue highlights in the boy’s face, marking him as an aristocrat in short pants. In another painting, the collar encircling one lovely, muted woman’s face is layered like a wedding cake, cascading blues and purples in contrast with washy yellows, complex and compelling. When the theoreticians want to attack painting at its foundations, they usually aim at its ahistoricity. In Moore’s case, questions are raised about character and personality while allowing us the immediate pleasure of paint on canvas, and isn’t it this pleasure of seeing that is the real object of attack, that the enjoyment of art keeps us from seeing the political and economic nastiness of social time? In this light, the practice of Gerhard Richter, a source Moore probably wasn’t referring to, shadows these paintings. Over the years, Moore has experimented with a number of painterly styles, and like Richter, was never satisfied to rest too long on any one. More to the point is the quasi-historical use of family photos. In Richter’s work, the painted photos refer to a sense of collective guilt, the complicity of his family in the Nazi era. While Moore clearly does not attribute historical guilt to her forebears, there is that nagging knowledge that the 19th century westward expansion of American farmers and ranchers displaced the Southwestern Indians and Mexicans. While Moore is not directly addressing this, the historic awareness of difficult lives, lived in a process of relocation and personal suffering, suffuses these images with the gloom of history. If this doesn’t satisfy those critics who demand of art an atonement for manifest destiny, it points to the crossed paths of family destiny and history. Back