M. Louise Stanley (born 1942) is an American painter, known for irreverent figurative work that combines myth and allegory, satire, autobiography, and social commentary.Chadwick, Whitney. "Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California Painting," Art Journal, College Art Association of America, Winter, 1985, p. 309–13.Landauer, Susan. "Having Your Cake and Painting It, Too," The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration, Kansas City, KS: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art/San Jose Museum of Art, 2000.Baker, Kenneth. "Laugh Lines / San Jose Museum of Art's `Lighter Side' features artists breaking with New York orthodoxy,"San Francisco Chronicle, September 4, 2000, G1. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Desmarais, Charles. "M. Louise Stanley’s very contemporary history paintings," San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Writers such as curator Renny Pritikin situate her early-1970s work at the forefront of the "small, but potent" Bad Painting movement, so named for its "disregard for the niceties of conventional figurative painting."Pritikin, Renny. "M. Louise Stanley @ Richmond Art Center," SquareCylinder, April 12, 2019. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Porges, Maria. M. Louise Stanley @ Kala," SquareCylinder, May 9, 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Stanley's paintings frequently focus on romantic fantasies and conflicts, social manners and taboos, gender politics, and lampoons of classical myths, portrayed through stylized figures, expressive color, frenetic compositions and slapstick humor.Shere, Charles. "Women's Art that Aims for Higher Values," Oakland Tribune, January 30, 1977.Winter, David. "M. Louise Stanley," ARTnews Magazine, March 1986.Rubin, David. "M. Louise Stanley at Rena Bransten," Art in America, April 1986.Fisher, Jack. "Often-hilarious wicked exhibit takes a look at moral depravity," San Jose Mercury News, May 5, 2002. Art historians such as Whitney Chadwick place Stanley within a Bay Area narrative tradition that blended eclectic sources and personal styles in revolt against mid-century modernism; her work includes a feminist critique of contemporary life and art springing from personal experience and her early membership in the Women's Movement.Plagens, Peter. "4 Bay Area Painters," Artforum, June 1972, p. 87–9.Jan, Alfred. "M. Louise Stanley at Haines," Visions, Summer, 1991, p. 42.Fisher, Jack. "S.J. Museum of Art offers look at figuration movement's humor," San Jose Mercury News, September 25, 2000. Stanley has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.Miller, M. H. "Here Are the 2015 Winners of Guggenheim Fellowships," ARTnews, April 14, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Noomin, Diane (ed). "Contributor Biographies," Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival, New York: Harry Abrams, 2019, p. 259. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Winter, David. "Artists the Critics are Watching," ARTnews, November 1984, p. 91–3. Her work has been shown at institutions including PS1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The New Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art, and belongs to public collections including SFMOMA, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, and de Saisset Museum.Koppman, Debra. "M. Louise Stanley at the SFMOMA Rental Gallery," Artweek, February 2000.Benson, Heidi. "San Jose Museum's Landauer Loves 'the Hunt,'"San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2001. Retrieved September 27, 2019.San Jose Museum of Art. M. Louise Stanley works, Collection. Retrieved September 28, 2019.Oakland Museum of California. "M. Louise Stanley," Collections. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Stanley lives and works in Emeryville, California.Thym, Jolene. "Creators at Risk," Oakland Tribune, May 16, 1993, p. C1, C7.
Early life and career M. Louise Stanley was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1942, and grew up in South Pasadena, California.Auping, Michael. "M. Louise Stanley, Matrix/Berkeley 14" (exhibition essay), Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1978. Her parents, William ("Bill") and Marie Stanley, both children of missionary parents, first met in China as teenagers.Hall, Stan. "Retired Scientist Tests Old Master Violin Makers; Finds They Were Right," Carmel Valley Sun, April 18, 1990, p. 16. After their families later re-settled in the United States, they reunited, married, and had three children, Louise, Susan and Alfred; Bill became an analytical chemist, and Marie, a chemical laboratory technician. Louise took an early interest in classical art and illuminated manuscripts (including the Gutenberg Bible) through visits to the nearby Huntington Library. She learned to paint alongside her father, who was an accomplished watercolorist, and in his retirement, a violin-maker.Dowling, Lynn. "Louise Stanley: Portrait of the Artist," The Santa Clara, October 15, 1981 p. 17–8.
Stanley attended the conservative, Brethren La Verne College (BA, 1964), supplementing her studies by motor-scootering to Scripps College for life drawing classes.Boston Voyager. "Art & Life with M. Louise Stanley," Boston Voyager, August 20, 2018. Retrieved September 27, 2019. In 1965, she moved to the Bay Area and enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts (BFA, 1967; MFA, 1969), where she found a like-minded community. She studied with Peter Saul and was influenced by H. C. Westermann and sources such as Outsider art, underground comics, and the Alameda flea market. In the early 1970s, she was one of the early Bay Area artists to join the emerging Woman's Movement, along with Judith Linhares; their organized group of women artists took part in several gender-focused exhibitions that helped to establish the legitimacy of personal, narrative-based and feminist work.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanley began teaching, lecturing and exhibiting across the country, including solo shows at PS1 and Women's Interart Center (New York) and Matrix Gallery (UC Berkeley), the Rena Bransten and Quay galleries (San Francisco), and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum;Trebay, Guy. "El Lay Paints Itself," The Village Voice, May 1, 1978.Anderson, Bill. "Mythology for Moderns," The Independent Santa Barbara, March 26, 1987. she also appeared in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, Newport Harbor Museum, The New Museum and Fashion Moda (New York), de Saisset Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and Artists Space (1988), among others.Fish, Mary. "Market Street Artists," Artweek, July 7, 1973.Auping, Michael. "Colliding: Myth, Fantasy, Nightmare," New York: Artists Space, February, 1988.Baker, Kenneth. "M. Louise Stanley," San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 1987. Her first trips to Italy in the 1980s inspired new classical elements in her work, as did her personally conducted "Art Lover's Tours" to Europe, which began in 1994 and numbered fourteen in total.
In subsequent years, in addition to gallery shows, Stanley has received retrospectives at the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery (1999) and Dominican University (2007) and solo shows at the Richmond Art Center, Kala Art Institute (2019), and MarinMOCA (2021); she has participated in major group shows at The Drawing Center, San Jose Museum of Art and Oakland Museum, among others.Morris, Barbara. "M. Louise Stanley at Dominican University," Artweek, December 2007/January 2008, p. 16–7.Cheng, DeWitt, "Ovid Redux: M. Louise Stanley Paints the Classics at the Kala Institute," East Bay Express, May 8, 2019, p. 17.Wasserman, Abby. "The Art of Narrative," The Oakland Museum Magazine, Winter, 1991.MarinMOCA. "M. Louise Stanley: No Regrets," Exhibitions, 2021. Retrieved March 9, 2021. She is represented by Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco.Anglim Gilbert Gallery. "M. Louise Stanley," Artists. Retrieved September 27, 2019.
Work and reception Writers characterize Stanley as "a socially and politically engaged satirist" in the tradition of history painting, whose work documents the human condition, modern-day romance, and contemporary social issues using humor, allegory, myth and idiosyncratic, expressive figuration. She emerged amid a 1960s Bay Area art scene that reacted against Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and the disengagement of Pop art by embracing eclectic and "low-brow" influences—Bay Area funk and figuration, surrealism, Chicago's Monster Roster, urban street life, comics and popular media—to create socially engaged narrative work.Chadwick, Whitney. "Bay Area Narrative Painting" (exhibition essay), University Art Gallery, San Francisco: San Francisco State University, 1977. For Stanley and many others, the Women's Movement was equally influential, stimulating consciousness-raising and the development of forms of expression based on personal imagery, experiences and feelings; in the later 1970s several of these women (Stanley included) were associated with the "Bad Painting" movement, noted for its rejection of "good taste," social taboos and obviously displayed skill.Leonard, Michael. "Having Fun with History," Artweek, February 28, 1991.Linhares, Phil. "A School of Painting Born at C.C.A.C.," Review, February 21, 1984, p. 9.
Early figurative satires (1970–9) Stanley dubbed the iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek style of her early work "junior high realism," pointing up its affinity with irreverent notebook-doodle caricature and preference for emotional and observational truth over realism.Stanley, M. Louise. "Archive 1969–1979," Work. Retrieved September 28, 2019. She painted satires of polite-society formality and American lifestyles, bawdy barroom vignettes, sexually charged domestic scenes and fantastical moments of oddball horror (e.g., Rust's Wedding, 1971).Brown, Christopher. "Sam Richardson's Reductivism, Louise Stanley's Funk," Artweek, January 28, 1978.Curtis, Cathy. "6 Aspiring Water Colorists," Richmond Independent Sunday Magazine, October 14, 1979.Albright, Thomas. "A Show of the Outrageous," San Francisco Chronicle, September 27, 1972. They expressed both private feelings, fears and fantasies and her politicized feminist consciousness—often through powerfully assertive, "brassy" 1930s-1940s-styled women that critics likened to Benton or Reginald Marsh figures, like those in her works The Mystic Muse and the Bums Who Sleep on the Golf Course Behind the Oakland Cemetery (1970) and Barroom Brawl (1977).Paul, April. "Line, Laughter, Lechery," California Aggie, January 25, 1978.
Reviews noted Stanley's elongated, swan-necked figuration, expressive draftsmanship, tilted compositions and electric colors, and watercolor mastery;Loach, Roberta. "Touching All Things," Visual Dialogue Quarterly, Women in the Visual Arts, Spring 1977. Artforum critic Peter Plagens described it as attaining "a clumsy luminosity reminiscent of Marsden Hartley or John Kane," while the San Francisco Chronicle's Thomas Albright deemed it the "Bay Region's answer to Chicago's Hairy Who." During this time, Stanley often showed in pointedly gender-oriented exhibitions or groupings: a section of "Paintings on Paper" (San Francisco Art Institute, 1971), "Touching All Things" (Civic Art Center, Walnut Creek, 1977) and "Her Story" (Oakland Museum, 1991);Swift, Harriet. "Making Her Story," ''Oakland Tribune'', p. C/2, January 17, 1991.Heyman, Therese. ''Her Story: Narrative Art by Contemporary California Artists'' (catalogue), Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1991. these shows were sometimes appreciated for their then-novel exploration of inner life and sexual politics, and other times misunderstood or dismissed as "suburban," dilettantish, even sexist by largely male reviewers.Frankenstein, Alfred. "Art That's fit for 'Ladies,'" San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 1978.Martin, Fred. "Touching All Things or Touching Too Many," Artweek, Feb. 5, 1977.
Classical and contemporary allegories