By Ed Higgins
IT CAN BE SAID that, in their work, many artists are searching for Paradise. John Moore,
however, knows precisely where it is…13 miles west of Coatesville, Pennsylvania,
in Amish farm country. Those 13 miles separate a rusting manufacturing infrastructure
(that is loved by modernist painters) from rural tranquility.
Other Pennsylvania painters such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler have taken
advantage of the haunting quality of bare steel — and have found in the bare bones
of industrialization, the vocabulary of a society in change. Artists who share similar
visions have been called precisionist and abstract. However, some use a realistic
composition which leads to labels such a magic realism and surrealism. The current
exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania, Thirteen miles
from Paradise: Paintings by John Moore, provides a good representation of this type
of work. It runs through June 14 in a totally appropriate venue, as Moore is the
outgoing chairman of the University’s art department, a post he has held since 1999.
The exhibition is in collaboration with the School of Design. The paintings are once or
twice removed from actuality. They are composites of real things that Moore has seen
and studied, but combined in such a way as to create their own world. Looking at the
paintings requires work, since at first it appears as one thing, and then reveals itself
as something totally different.
For more than 30 years Moore has visited such places as Conneaut, Ohio, Waterville,
Maine, and, of course, Coatesville, Pennsylvania. His more recent work documents,
to a degree, changes in scenes he previously painted and they have been reinforced
with “site specifics, formal concerns and oral history as told by individuals with ties
to the sites.” Still, the scenes are immediately recognizable and familiar to us as
being quintessentially American.
Moore was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941 and received his BFA from Washington
University in 1966 and his MFA from Yale in 1968. He taught at Temple University’s
Tyler School of Art from 1978 to 1980 and at Boston University from 1988 to 1999.
His work has been exhibited at the most prestigious art galleries in the country,
including Locks Gallery on Washington Square and the Hirschl and Adler Gallery in
New York. The list of group and solo museum shows in which he has participated is
pages long, and his work is in the permanent collections of the country’s most well-
known museums and private collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Moore’s work remains totally accessible and viewers inevitably invent meanings for
themselves from the structure provided to them by his settings. For example, “A Fine
Fall Day” features a regal peacock in the foreground — and a renovated small city in
the background. I have no one single idea what that peacock is doing there, yet I
have a hundred thoughts about it. Fact is, that peacock is charming and just a bit
upsetting. Even being mystified by Moore is an engaging occupation.
Although the reconsidered industrial ruins are a Moore signature, according to a recent
catalog his work “is much about the act of looking — and seeing — as it is about the
process of creating a work of art. Drawing his subjects from the visible world, Moore
remains a painter of the ‘stuff ’ of our everyday lives, as he continues to incorporate
still-life arrangements, urban landscapes, and architectural motifs into his formally
constructed compositions.”
For most viewers who take the time to really look at Moore’s work, there will be
sufficient mystery for the imagination to range and ramble at least the 13 miles
from Coatesville to Paradise.