Pictorial life is a created reality. Without it, pictorial communication-the appeal to the senses and the mind-is nonexistent. Color, in nature as well as in the picture, is an agent to give the highest aesthetic enjoyment. The emotion-releasing faculty of the color related to the formal aspect of the work becomes a means to awaken within us feelings to which the medium of expression responds analogously when we attempt to realize our experiences creatively. Upon it will depend the formal and psychic appeal of the created image which is finally achieved through an absolute synchronization, in which a multitude of seemingly incompatible developments have been finally interwoven-molded in the synthesis of the work. Endowed with such cognition, all creative possibilities are left open to the imagination, inventiveness, and sensibility of the artist, and to the selective capability of his mind. Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
Hans Hoffmann 1
A compelling interest in surveying the development of an artist's oeuvre is the opportunity afforded to observe the differences that come to be manifested in the works, and to trace what abides throughout. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 2 Thus in this body of work by Rita Mallett Blasser: the work changes over time, while certain concerns, motifs, and the artist's sensibility perdure. This situation thus entails at once both dunamis and stasis: it is a process in which things come to be, conditioned by the historicity of their becoming. This is hardly surprising in the work of any artist, given a career spanning over four decades, and is the more so when the early work references its formative context of high modernism, while the late works have their historicity in the post-history of art. 3 This to suggest that this-or any-body of work has its interest in the works themselves, in the historicity of the situation of the works' facture, and in the resonances between the works-the space, as it were, between one's footsteps.
In Blasser's earliest works in the exhibition, two gelatin silver print photograms from 1968, attentiveness to visual texture, emphasis of the flatness of the image plane, found pattern, and structure are evident. These concerns, and a sensitivity to the spatial and expressive relationships of color, perdure throughout the development of Rita Mallett Blasser's work. These thematized concerns, no less than the recurrence of container motifs-shopping bags, vessel forms, sometimes abstracted to linear marks in relation to the edge of the field-persist through the body of work, including Blasser's extensive work in hard edge abstract paintings during the 1970s, regretfully omitted from the exhibition because of the limitation of space, but adumbrated in Completing the Square and Make Lemonade.
Grocery sacks, shopping bags, coffee cups, parts of cookie packages, newspaper pages are quotidian objects. Notwithstanding newspaper pages and nondescript vessels being the stuff of still life since Cubism, they and the grocery sacks and shopping bags are seemingly too much mere things to serve as the sustaining motifs of a body of work spanning four decades. That they have done so is manifest in the work. That this is so is perhaps a consequence of being an artist and a woman with a family during a period when such a duality was still uncommon and not conspicuously supported in the artworld, academia, or-in many instances-the artist's family, is not surprising. That Blasser was a Founding Member of the Women's Caucus for Art is another index of this situation. Consider, then, the delicious irony of employing the shopping bag, emblematic of a stereotyped role for women in 1950's America, as a motif within one's practice as an artist. If this ironic mode of employment of the shopping bag motif thus appeals to the mind, the means of its employment appeals to the senses and the mind. The bags in Two Bags are flattened, parallel to the image plane, juxtaposed so as to invited comparison. Two Bags invites comparison with the rectilinear shapes in Morning Coffee Ritual Too as well, where the painterly evocation of the shapes suggests more than describes paper bags, as it does in the early etching Study For Paper Bag, Paper Bag, and Heavy. Similar variation in engagement of the motif and regard of surface and mark obtains in the monoprints Plastic Holds a Lot, Grocery One and Grocery Two, and the collagraph Unexpected Star. In the monoprint On Line, the deployment of juxtaposed shapes is congruent with the field, with the enclosing liminal field shifted to the enframing space.
One observes an analogous move in the oscillation between representation and abstraction in the small paintings: Six Shapes occupies one pole, Thrust another. As Six Shapes entails description of things in their thingness, Thrust entails description of a property of the condition of representation as such.
To begin with grocery sacks, shopping bags, and various other nondescript containers and end with the thematization of the conditions of representation as such is at once to summarize a life's work and to attend to the aspect and implications of a single mark in a field. It is likewise to begin from the operational premises of modernism in its still ascendant phase, and examine, extend and revise those premises through an openness to experimental and innovative work in printmaking, and to in turn to apply the findings of that work to painting and drawing and painting as well. That is not a small matter, and attention must be paid.
Rita Mallet Blasser received the Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University, with post-graduate study at the University of North Texas, along with the significant influence of Carlotta Corpron, and private study with Hans Hoffmann, Wilfred Higgins and Victor Amico. Blasser taught at Cooke County College, El Centro College, Mountain View College, Eastfield College, and Texas Womans' University. Especially notable exhibitions of Blasser's work include: 1997 Ecole de Beaux Arts, Gran Palais, Paris; Global Focus: Women in Art and Culture, United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, Moscow, Washington, D.C.; Twenty-Five Women in Texas Art, Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin, and traveling; Longview Museum; Texas Womans' University. Blasser's work is in the collections of the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Southern Methodist University, University of North Texas, Brookhaven College, Inwood National Bank, Chase Econometrics, Owens Sausage, and private collections in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, St. Louis, New York City, Syracuse, Oklahoma City, Montreal, Philadelphia, and England. Blasser was a 1968 recipient of a Kress Foundation Grant.