Ellen Lanyon

A woman’s ability to have both a family and a successful career shouldn’t still be news, but Ellen Lanyon’s paintings suggest that it might be magic. Lanyon (b. 1926), who now splits her time between Chicago and New York, has incorporated bunnies, top hats, playing cards and other magician’s accoutrements into her work since 1962, not long before she realized they offered rich metaphors for feminism.

Silk Cabby (1972) overtly links women’s domestic wizardry to family happiness: A white scarf enters a cabinet with a house painted on it, emerging on the opposite side as a swirl of colored streamers and an orange flower. The piece reflects more optimism than two earlier paintings, The Housekeeper’s Terror (1968–69) and One Way to Quarter a Pear (1968–69), which depict china teacups balanced on knives and a white dining chair menaced by a wineglass. Both paintings are notable for their constrained space: The objects float in a large colored square that fills most of the canvas; they cast no shadows, eliminating any sense of depth, and they’re partly obscured by men’s arms reaching into the frame to manipulate them. Working when women’s lib faced more obstacles, Lanyon here seems to suggest that the implied housewives are “lovely assistants” instead of the ones running the show.

The exhibition jumps from the 1970s to Lanyon’s “Magic” works from the past decade, which shift away from feminist concerns. Crammed with lush green vegetation based on the endangered plants Lanyon observed during trips to the Everglades, these paintings overwhelm viewers with their profusion of colors and forms, but their beautifully rendered details make them cabinets of wonders.

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