Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Betye Saar
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
53%
The View from the Sorcerer’s Window. 1966. Assemblage of color and intaglio etchings and wood window frame with six panes of glass
I can't see much in this besides the degenerated sensibility of Joseph Cornell, with none of the structural inventiveness or symbolic acumen. Saar's moons and hands and stars and spotty application of ink feel more Gift Shop than Fine Art, though the emblems in the white bar in the lower third of the left middle picture are sufficiently cryptic to move past this. (Ditto what decorates the palm in the bottom left print.) The cupboard-door-as-frame is a conceptual thing that seems to have gotten in the way of elaborating how these six images could've related to each other structurally: is the fact that they're inside a domestic object more important than, say, the regularity of their size or how close together and gridded they are? Nor is there much rhythm established in images' progression. Saar seems to have been interested more in the intrarelationships of each pair than in the interrelationships of all six images. (2024)