'Pierrot in Blue' by Janice Haefner, Large Mid-Century Figural Oil by Early Los Altos, California Modernist

Description

Signed lower right, 'Haefner' for Janice Haefner (American, 1919-2002) and painted circa 1960; additionally signed, verso, and with artist address. … more Signed lower right, 'Haefner' for Janice Haefner (American, 1919-2002) and painted circa 1960; additionally signed, verso, and with artist address.

This life-time member of the Pacific Art League lived in Los Altos, Palo Alto and Carmel where she painted and exhibited with success for over fifty years.

A substantial figural oil showing a dramatic frontal view of a young man dressed in the costume of the stock member of the Commedia dell'arte. The artist offers us a bold, forward perspective on this traditional theatrical character that successive art movements over the centuries have adapted in different ways to fill their evolving needs. The Symbolists saw Pierrot as a lonely fellow-sufferer, crucified upon the rood of soulful sensitivity, his only friend the distant moon; the Modernists converted him into a Whistlerian subject for canvases devoted to form and color and line. Over time, Pierrot has become an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the famously alienated artist, and caustic observer, of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pierrot's often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—have conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the Commedia dell'arte and into the larger realm of myth inhabited by Everyman. less