Beating the "Dutch"

As I reported in an Aug. 2 piece for the Westchester County Business Journal, the Hudson Valley Center For Contemporary Art in Peekskill is planning a fall show that should do for Eastern Europe what "Double Dutch" did for The Netherlands.

"After the Fall" (Sept. 19-July 24) considers 18 emerging artists from East and Central Europe,
people like Romanian painter Leonardo Silaghi -- represented here by his "Untitled" -- who were born under Communism but came of age post-Gorby.

To what extent did Communism -- a monstrously idealistic philosophy that was doomed to failure -- shape these artists? In Silaghi's case, his "Untitled" seems to have captured the gray, workaday image of the proletariat. Remember the marvelous commercial that satirized Commie fashion with the same potato-sack outfit for swimwear, day wear and evening wear (the last accessorized by an industrial flashlight)? Silaghi's painting has something of that pointed drabness.

In any event, it's always intriguing to consider the effect that a time and a place have on an artist. It should be another provocative HVCCA show.

The notion of "After the Fall" reminds me of a concert I covered years ago when Philharmonia Virtuosi, led by the late, lamented Richard Kapp, was one of the house "bands" at Purchase College (then SUNY Purchase). Among the concerts' treats were Kapp's witty, erudite asides to the audience about music and life -- like the cartoon he saw riffing on The Mostly Mozart Festival that contained three banners -- "Mostly Mozart, Basically Bach and Practically All the Telemann You Can Stand."

Anyway, this was the 1980s, the end of the Cold War, and Kapp once remarked that there was no need to defeat the Soviet Union militarily.

"We'll conquer them with our culture," he said.

Today, everyone in Russia looks like they stepped out of an episode of "Law & Order."

How prescient that remark turned out to be.

Photo courtesy of HVCCA. For more on the show, log on to hvcca.org or call 914-788-0100.

Georgette Gouveia is a reporter for Westfair Communications Inc., which publishes the Westchester County Business Journal, the Fairfield County Business Journal and HV Biz. You can read her stories at westfaironline.com.