Edna Hibel:
Open Letter To Artists
by
Joan Altabe, for Fine Art Registry®
Open Letter To Artists from an Art Critic, Part 9
There are too many Edna Hibels in the world. Here's hoping you're not one of them.
Edna Hibel is a merchandising package, a bad painter with her own museum (Jupiter, FL) and her own stores selling her work on plates, on note cards, on handbags...There's even an Edna Hibel Society. Paying members get a newsletter and stuff from the store.
How bad is her painting? If you've seen one, you've seen them all: masks and costumes that are meant to be people. They idealize, embalm and otherwise clean up the act of being human. Downplaying life, dolling it up, buffing it, brushing it off, Hibel paints life as it never existed: a Stepford world where apple-cheeked children with their apple-cheeked mothers smile and smile. Everyone's a character in a '50s TV sitcom - unmarked by life, by concerns, by fear.
And the Hibel way of making humanity presentable does more than dehumanize, it says that the way people actually are is not worth picturing.
Nearly 90 years old now, she's been at this dehumanizing for years, and I keep wondering when she will tire of it. My wondering started 20 years ago when I first saw her exhibit called "Celebration of Life" full of figures grinning out of an overflow of well-being. Unaccountably, Hibel's exhibit literature said, "No one has ever painted with such an insightful, loving heart."
Her pictures of motherhood by themselves refute this. The prepared pose, the pale skin and limp lifeless hands, like unclaimed gloves, the inconclusive embraces reinforce the tepid, even cold feeling that her mothers impart with their children.
In 1995, the National Archives asked Hibel to paint a commemorative image honoring the 75th anniversary of women's suffrage. Her image of choice was off her shelf: a mother and child, as if to say that giving women the vote equates with maternity.
Granted, Hibel included in her commemorative painting the Statue of Liberty and a child waving a flag. But mother and child dominate. But the way that Hibel pictures maternity has as much to do with parenting as her picture for the National Archives has to do with women getting the vote.
The redundancy in her work raises its unvaried head in another way, owing to her habit of reprinting her paintings on plates, notepads and porcelain dolls. Even if you leave all the retailing out of the picture, the art lover who collects Hibel loses, owing to the sameness of her work and lack of imagination.
You might call Hibel a latter-day Norman Rockwell. But even Rockwell tired of mawkishness and mush. When he turned 80, he told his son, "I was doing this best-possible-world. Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandparents sort of thing. And I liked it, but now I'm sick of it. If I could start over again, I'd paint like Picasso."
No need to do that. If you're an Edna Hibel, just put your paintbrushes away.
— by Joan Altabe
| August 26, 2006
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