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A TOUCH OF CHICANERY
San Francisco /James Scarborough

Hermann Lederle’s new work at Lawson Galleries perfectly illustrates Jose Orega y Gasset’s contention in The Modern Theme that art, along with culture, reason and ethics, must enter the service of life. Ortega y Gasset prescribes, among other things, an art that is spontaneous, athletic and imbued with vitality; he finds it most apt that modern public history began on a tennis court in France.

Lederle’s work, too, falls within the ambit of modern expressionism in that it demonstrates, to a certain degree, the failure of traditional symbols to move us and the need to galvanize them with a shot of heroic energy. The result, ironically, is purely a superficial attraction. Take, for example, Election (1985), which presents symbols in search of a context in what amounts to an iconographical shopping list. It includes a tongue-tied figure with awkward hands, acting like a wallflower at a dance. Beside him hovers a fish and one of those little Keith Haring "Gumby" figures, looking surprisingly enervated. This is a spent art, as if the artist is waiting for someone (but who?) to pull the strings so his paintings can start moving. But there is more to Lederle’s work than this.

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