Manon Cleary
Manon Cleary "Rat"
1990s

Name: Manon Cleary "Rat"
Brand: Manon Cleary
Price: 5500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Photorealist oil painting by Manon Cleary (1942-2011). Painting is signed on reverse "Cleary". Painting is stretched on aluminum stretcher and dates to the 1990s. Manon Cleary had a remarkable ability to draw and paint with photographic fidelity, but she was also known as a charismatic teacher at the University of the District of Columbia and as a free spirit whose exuberant life may have been her most enduring work of art. Since the 1970s, Ms. Cleary had been at the center of a group of artists in Adams Morgan. She exhibited her meticulous artwork throughout the city and around the world, but she also became known for her striking presence, her colorful love life and the rats she kept as pets. As an artist, Ms. Cleary borrowed classical techniques from her deep study of Renaissance masters to create paintings and drawings memorable for their frank realism and sometimes disturbing themes. In addition to her many nude self-portraits, Ms. Cleary made erotically charged paintings of flowers. She took inspiration from a painful personal history in a series of works depicting the terror of rape and, in later years, of not being able to breathe without mechanical assistance. Critics considered her a leading figurative artist of the photo-realist school, in which painters render their subjects with camera-like precision. In fact, Ms. Cleary occasionally won awards for photography when adjudicators didn’t realize her works were free-hand creations. She was “widely acknowledged to be among the best, if not the best, of the city’s figurative painters,” Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan wrote in 2006. “There is a tension between the cool, clinical detachment of photography and painting’s warm idealization of form.” Ms. Cleary exhibited her art in galleries and museums from Moscow to Paris to Hickory, N.C., but Washington was her home for the past 42 years. In 1974, she settled in the decrepit Beverly Court apartments on Columbia Road NW, where a coterie of artists soon grew up around her. She painted her walls purple, and her fourth-floor apartment — even with the pet rats — became something of a bohemian salon. “She was a star,” painter Judy Jashinsky told the Washington City Paper in 2004. “She was stunning, beautiful; long, brownish–black hair; real thin; wore . . . little sundresses and sandals. She was just very cool, and there was always a crowd around her.” Ms. Cleary had a long list of male admirers, including several whose confrontational attempts at “performance art” led to their arrests. She had a brief marriage in 1981 to a Danish artist known as Tommy — “just Tommy,” Ms. Cleary said — whom she divorced in less than a year. As a kind of graphic homage to her various lovers, Ms. Cleary made a series of intimately revealing portraits that were featured years later on the HBO program “Real Sex.” She met her second husband after a gallery opening in Baltimore. By way of introduction, Kijek, a dancer, stripped naked at a crowded party, walked up to Ms. Cleary and said, “Wouldn’t you like me to pose for you?” They were married in 2001. In spite of her unconventional life, Ms. Cleary was more than a mere provocateur. After a day of teaching at UDC, she would return to her studio, with its windows painted over to block out sunlight, and work late into the night, with a bottle of Dr Pepper at her side. She took nude photographs of herself from every angle, then painstakingly created lifelike images that seemed alive with the warmth of human flesh. After studying in Rome in her youth, she developed what she called “an obsession” with Caravaggio, an iconoclastic painter who lived from 1573 to 1610. She often copied paintings at the National Gallery of Art and, in her own work, blended Renaissance styles with a distinctly modern sensibility. Manon Catherine Cleary was born Nov. 14, 1942, in St. Louis. Her father was a doctor, and her identical twin sister, Shirley Cleary-Cooper, is an artist in Helena, Mont. She was a 1964 graduate of Washington University in her home town and, for the rest of her life, was proud of having been a member of the Pi Phi sorority. After teaching at a junior high school near St. Louis, she studied in Italy and Spain and received a master of fine arts degree from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1968. Some of Ms. Cleary’s works are in the collections of museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum and Chicago Art Institute. After being given a rat as a pet in the 1970s, Ms. Cleary made rats a recurring subject of her art, often in large-scale paintings, with each hair shown in luminous detail. Once, when an art gallery replaced one of Ms. Cleary’s self-portraits with a painting of a rat, the label “Self-Portrait” was left on the wall. “All of my work has been about self — even the rats,” she told Washingtonian magazine in 2005. “I do have a rat nose and rat hands.” “If she saw talent, she would really support it and promote it,” Washington art collector and gallery owner Fernando Batista said in an interview. “She tied together so many groups, older and younger. There are very few people like that.” Even with the pet rats, Ms. Cleary’s candle-lit apartment became known as a gathering place for an ever-changing group of Washington artists. “I keep the light levels low all the time — curtains drawn except in the dining room, where the plants need sun, and windows painted over in my studio,” she told The Post in 1998. “And I entertain at night, when dust doesn’t show.” Written by Matt Schudel for the Washington Post, Dec 3, 2011.

Creator:

Manon Cleary (1942 - 2011, American)

Creation Year:

1990s

Dimensions:

Height: 30 in (76.2 cm)Width: 40 in (101.6 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)

Medium:

Oil,Canvas

Movement & Style:

Photorealist

Period:

1990-1999