Jack Rasmussen

A show of new work by Nan Montgomery is cause for celebration. We have waited a lifetime for this consummate body of work to appear.

Thirty years ago I was wandering through Eric Rudd’s artistic warren at 52 O Street, in downtown Washington, DC, and came upon the studio of Nan Montgomery. She invited me in, and I noticed virtually every available surface of her studio was festooned with used, partially painted strips of masking tape. She was making large-scale geometric abstractions at that time, and I immediately fell in love with their unusual combination of intelligent design, finely-nuanced color, and obsession.

I showed Nan’s work then, and have followed her artistic trajectory ever since. Slowly and deliberately, she has found her own way to a perfect balance between abstraction and representation, hard edges and subtle modeling, intellectual rigor and emotional embrace. Her latest work is all we could wish for: beautiful surfaces and depths of meaning.

It is especially satisfying to see this body of work at the Osuna Art, where so many great Washington talents have found their audience.

Jack Rasmussen

Director and Curator, American University Museum

Elizabeth Tebow

In a career spanning 40 years in Washington, D.C., Nan Montgomery has established a reputation as a masterful abstract painter and colorist.  For the past decade or so, she has been merging representational images with her minimalist aesthetic. The fusion of abstraction and realism has taken a new direction in her most recent work, which features large images of flowers isolated against color fields.  Compositional balance and abstract formal relationships are as important as in her non-objective paintings, but now they are coupled with a subject redolent with meaning.  Potent metaphors in art and literature, flowers have symbolic associations with love, death, fidelity, sacrifice, honor, marital status, divinity, devotion and the sacred. While symbolic meanings, as well as “feminine” associations of flowers, are inescapable, Montgomery’s depictions of them defy easy, predictable interpretation and, instead, offer tantalizing references to personal concerns as well as historical events.

The path to the artist’s new subject matter not only follows a logical aesthetic progression from her artistic foundation, but also was guided by her interest in nature and response to a changing world.  After studying printmaking at the Boston Museum School, Montgomery enrolled at Yale in the late ‘50s and began painting under the mentorship of Josef Albers.  Feeling, as she put it, unable (or averse to) competing with the prevailing gestural aggression of Abstract Expressionism, she chose, instead, to draw from her woman’s “inner strength.”  She moved to Washington, D.C., as a young bride in the ‘60s and put her art aside, preoccupied with the demands of being a wife and new mother.  By her own account, she was unaware at the time of the Washington Color School, which was emerging as a major phenomenon for the city’s art.  In the early ‘70s when her son, the youngest of her three children, reached school age, she returned to art by enrolling in a class at the Corcoran.  As she recalls, she had an immediate sense of being at home in a studio again.  By the late ‘70s, Montgomery was exhibiting her paintings at museums, galleries and arts centers throughout the Washington/Baltimore area.  A show in 1986 at Osuna Gallery featured large horizontal canvases with subtly-colored geometric shapes suggestive of intersecting planes within architectural interiors.

In the ‘90s, Montgomery shifted course, feeling, as she now acknowledges, that her exploration of geometric abstraction was starting to become somewhat stale.  In a quest for new inspiration, she turned to nature, enrolling in a course offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on natural history that included field trips to study plants up close with a hand lens.  Back in the studio, her canvases changed from rectangular to a more self-referential square, and her images to single, centered shapes ranging from crosses and hexagons to circles.   Her palette varied from intense molten reds and oranges to earth tones of brown, cream and deep indigo and violet.  It was as if she were capturing the intricate forms of plant life newly revealed to her through a magnifying lens.  The idea of focus and sight was further elaborated on in the series of paintings of concentric circles, some with alternating colors radiating out from the central iris-like circle, others with superimposed multi-pointed stars for the pupil.  But the eye/sight analogy did not end there; she bisected the central “iris” with a horizon, light above, darker below.  The “eye” sees nature while the spectator simultaneously sees the eye and its vision. In Stella Maris (egg tempera on gessoed wood, 1994), the sea and sky are accompanied by the orb of the moon or sun, its light reflecting on the water below.

In 2000, the conceit of an “eye,” from which the spectator could glimpse land and sky, gave way to larger vistas of mountains and sky, framed, as in Scoriae (2000, oil on linen), by vertical bands of thick and thin stripes.  As before, geometry and nature compliment each other but, at the same time, are contrasted. The stripes not only assert the autonomy of the painting surface, but also serve to compliment and anchor the pristine contours of the representational landscape elements.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and a dream she had not long after, inspired Montgomery to create one of her first flower paintings, Unity (2002, oil on masonite).   A gladiolus with white blossoms bisects a vertical panel painted in intense cadmium red, its form surrounded by an aura of yellow light.  Was it merely coincidence that a flower often used for funeral bouquets became her central motif in a work that suggests a tower and fire, fragility and loss?  In Alliance (oil on linen, 2006), a gladiolus is placed slightly off center between fields of dark indigo and red balanced by a thin vertical white stripe on the right. The effect is musical, that of a somber, rhythmical cadence.  In Twain (2006, oil on linen, image on page 25), two calla lilies arc gracefully in a kind of pas de deux, their elegant white petals and sturdy green stems set against a Venetian red background which, on close inspection, is made up of small, meticulous strokes of deep purple over a red under painting.  While tantalizingly reminiscent of lilies being presented to Mary by the Angel Gabriel in Renaissance annunciation paintings, the piece also stands alone pictorially with the bold simplicity of its design and the subtle gestural effects of the background.

Although control and pictorial balance are important elements in all of her work, there are flashes of both passion and abandon as well. In Violation (2002, oil on masonite), for example,  a cyclamen plant,  with a cluster of delicate white blossoms accented by luminous shadows of violet and blue, explodes into jagged lines that are literally cut into the cadmium red background paint conveying intense emotion (pain? anger? danger?) at odds with the passive flowers.   Tellingly, Montgomery painted this piece shortly after her daughter was treated for a brain aneurysm.  Although a more obscure Christian symbol than the lily, the cyclamen was associated with the Virgin Mary’s sorrow at the crucifixion.  Whether the artist was aware of this connection or not, or even consciously responding to her concern for her child, the confluence of meanings is inescapable.   In a recent series of paintings of cattails, undercurrents of tension and conflict have given way to a more playful, lighthearted mood, revealed as well in titles such as Scherzo (2008, oil on linen). Sturdier than delicate lilies and gladioli with solid brown cylindrical flowers and thick stems, her cattails are more masculine-looking and call to mind the outdoors, wetlands, and summer days. 

In the flower paintings, Montgomery continues to explore composition and equilibrium of parts. While accurate in detail, they are isolated from an environment, simplified and executed with precision and clarity, reflecting the influence of Albers, and the “less is more” Bauhaus aesthetic.  Although not active in the Washington art scene during the period of the Color School, Montgomery throughout all of her career has shown an affinity for the movement’s preoccupation with color interaction and color’s primacy as a structural element.  This affinity is no less so in the flower paintings with their intense color field backgrounds and the delicate interplay of hues in the smallest of details of a petal or blossom.  Embracing nature in these paintings was also a return to the artist’s roots.  

Born in Boston, but raised in rural Walpole, New Hampshire, Montgomery has, for years, divided her time between Washington and East Alstead, New Hampshire, north of Keene in the hills of the Connecticut River Valley.  The summers in New England, where she feels more in tune with nature and the cycles of life, have enriched the art she makes back home in the Washington suburbs and in her studio in a warehouse district in Mt. Rainier, Maryland.  The flower paintings elegantly and provocatively distill the impulses that have guided her oeuvre through the years while also bringing the spectator to a new awareness of the structures and beauty of plant life.  In these, her most recent paintings, Montgomery uses an intense, expressive palette; restrained gestural brushwork; bold abstraction; and symbolic undercurrents to reveal to her audience the symbiotic relationships of realism and abstraction and of man and nature.

Elizabeth Tebow, Ph.D.

Professor of Art History, Northern Virginia Community College.

Co-author/producer with Mary Ann Tighe, Art America, video course, and Art America, textbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).

Contributor to The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, ed. Erika D. Passantino and David W. Scott, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Essayist for catalogues for exhibitions by Washington artists Hilda Thorpe, Foon Sham, and Joan Danziger, among others. History Committee chairperson, Washington Arts Museum.

Jean Lawlor Cohen

"Dual-Minded"

Where Magazine
Washington, D.C. - December, 2008

Advice to gallery goers: allow a little time for looking at the paintings of Nan Montgomery. At first, her new oils seem pleasant botanicals, but then…what about those colors not found in nature or those encroaching stripes?

An established Washington artist, Montgomery has always been intrigued by color and geometry. (She studied, after all, with Josef Albers at Yale.) And for years, she produced abstract work—atmospheric color on armatures of the square, cross and circle.  More recently, however, she’s incorporated vistas or in-your-face plant life. One essayist called it a “back and forth between the two great American subjects, landscape and abstraction.”

In her current show at Osuna Art, gladioli figure in several works. Their strong verticals echo the stripes that lie beneath the stems or hover at the canvas edge. “Scherzo” began with that thin, cadmium red stripe laid uneasily off-center on the purplish ground. The curving stems, each an unnatural single color, play off the rigidity of the stripes that frame them. Montgomery relishes the tension she creates between a geometric form and the cattails she found growing beside a country road.

Karen Schafer

For half a century, Nan Montgomery has delved into the relationship between abstraction and realism, "contrasting the material world and the natural world."

In non-artist speak, she likes to paint opposites, in this case, the elongated flower, often a gladiola or calla lily, against sharp geometric edges. Maybe the ruby red glad is pure perfection, but in Montgomery's paintings, the tension between color, geometric shapes and posy is palpable.

Over the years, she has been labeled as one of the Washington Color School's "second generation." While she professes disdain for such categorization, she gives in.

"I will leave it up to others," she says.

Influenced by Yale University School of Art Professor Josef Albers' "less is more" philosophy, Montgomery completed college in 1960, five years before the feminist movement started to take shape. Career took a backseat to marriage and children. By the 1970s, the artist was ready to start painting again. Trouble is Montgomery knew she had "a lot to learn. Minimalist, performance art had come into the picture." From the first day of taking classes at the Corcoran School of Art, listening to the other students chat, she felt right at home.

"They were speaking my language," she observes.

For the next 20 years, Montgomery worked on color and shape, developing a definite style. By the 1990s, she had enough of said style, figuring, "There was already a lot of minimal abstraction out there."

The painter began thinking about her growing up in rural New Hampshire.

"I always loved the natural world," she recalls. "Then I moved here, and well, I had to come to terms with material stuff."

Taking natural history classes, Montgomery studied plant detail. "Looking through a hand lens," she became "fascinated with the plant's intricate details."

Soon, she was incorporating landscapes into her geometric shapes.