"Ars sine scientia nihil est" is the title of a landmark article written by a noted architectural historian some decades ago to investigate the role of science in the building of Gothic cathedrals. It might be equally appropriate as the title of this essay on the art of Leigh Behnke. Architecture and structural forms dominate Behnke’s work, and scientific concepts are often the catalyst for discourse presented in the mute language of the visual arts. Behnke uses formats for her work that are based on multiple panels; the formats function to underscore the elaboration of formal and conceptual issues that are at the heart of her imagery. As noted artists have before her, Behnke uses her combined interest in science and art as a means of calculating ways to understand our universe.

Behnke studied interior design at Pratt Institute. It was at Pratt that she developed a keen interest in architecture and the history of New York City. She started making sculpture - monumental welded pieces featuring planes moving through space - the sensibility connected very much to architectural massing and to the properties of architecture to shape, impose character upon and define space. Health problems forced her to give up sculpture. She turned, by necessity, to painting as an outlet for her highly creative concepts. In the shift to painting in the mid '70s, the basic premise of her art - the fascination with the articulation of space - remained unchanged. She began to find worthy subject matter in dichotomies such as order / chaos and the celestial / terrestrial, as well as in the study of the underlying mechanisms of things. While she had been forced to give up sostanza (the actual articulation of the third dimension) for ephemera (the illusion of it), she adopted realism as the basis of her pictorial language and thereby gained the ability to draw from the entire spectrum of natural and man-made things in order to manipulate forms more comprehensively in service to her aims within the microcosm of her paintings.

It was in 1976, the year that Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody (composed of 988 square steel plates, uniform in size, silk screened and painted in enamel) was 'unveiled,' that Behnke presented her own systems of sequential panels in her work as an associative device to explore theories of perception. The seminal investigations of the late 19th and early 20th century vanguard movements in art and photography provided the point of departure. Her intention was, for example, to make representational versions of Josef Albers's famous Squares (late modernism’s first true serial art), colorist versions of Muybridge’s stop-action photography, and to deconstruct cubism. Behnke continued to introduce other complex scenarios into her paintings directing them to investigations not only of times of day, color shifts, and intriguing compositional geometries but to plays with interior and exterior space, with their corollary, the picture plane, and with mechanical movement. In an early still life sequential ensemble, Three Spectral Pairs (1978), she examined the interrelationships and function of color, form, and cast shadow as one moves through the color spectrum. In Time Sequences, Value Changes‚she studied the shift of what we see, as light and shadow exchange roles at various times of day. She continued to introduce more and more complex scenarios into her paintings. Light Study with Venetian Blinds‚ 1982, investigates not only times of day, color shifts, and intriguing compositional geometries, but plays with interior and exterior space, with their corollary the picture plane (as figure/ground; mass/void; etc.), and with mechanical movement. The clever protagonist is a pair of venetian blinds, seen from the inside and controlled by an unseen hand, that progressively shuts out the outside. Accordingly, the source of light shifts from natural to artificial as day gives way to night.

Behnke chose watercolor as her primary medium in these early paintings, because it gave her the ability to work through ideas quickly. She was already adept as a watercolorist by virtue of a background in textile design. An inspired exhibition of masters of twentieth-century watercolor reinforced her appreciation of the immediacy, directness and potential of the medium.

The experiments of late ’70s and early ’80s laid the groundwork for the beautifully crafted, skillfully manipulated, and complexly intriguing mature paintings. Behnke shifted her preference of medium to oil in order to mine its range of color, transparency and luminonsity, the pictorial equivalent of light, through techniques of glazing. As she moved from interior to exterior architectural subjects, her paintings took on new breadth and visual monumentality. She developed a variant of her sequential format in which there could be primary and related subsidiary panels, much in the manner of the principal panels and predellas of Renaissance polyptychs. While she continued her investigation of perceptual and formal problems, the paintings increasingly became vehicles for the exploration of scientific observations. Noteworthy among these later paintings are Wallace’s Heresy (1990) and Rephrasing Fermi’s Question (1991).

The Wallace referred to in Wallace’s Heresy is Alfred Russel Wallace, contemporary of Charles Darwin, who also advanced a theory of natural selection. He deviated from the official Darwinian canon by positing a nonbiological, divine animating agent - identified as 'spiritualism' - as a component of the evolutionary process to explain manÕs higher mental capabilities. Surely as we marvel at the dense outcroppings of ManhattanÕs manmade canyons presented by Behnke in birds-eye view in the main panel of Wallace’s Heresy, and from street level with heads thrown back and faces to the sky in the set of predellas below, we understand that Behnke joins Wallace in casting some doubt upon the perhaps too linear Darwinian party line. A subcontext is offered as well, in the fact that the physics, statics and engineering inherent in the manmade structures - that is, in the clustered buildings that make a metropolis - have led to the ultimate standoff between man and the natural world. In Rephrasing Fermi’s Question, our faces are again lifted to the heavens. Fermi reputedly asked, "If there are extra-terrestrials, where are they?" Behnke again begs the viewer to go no farther than our quotidian experience. They are all around us waiting to be discovered - whether in the starry cosmos or in the architectural, artistic, or poetic vocabulary that have hosted winged and fish-tailed creatures since antiquity - ever present reminders that when we look from other than our normal vantage point the chaos and detachment of the daily bustle of a midtown neighborhood falls away to reveal the perhaps truer order of things.

In keeping with the message of her paintings, Behnke’s uses poetic license in the fabrication of her city views or individual buildings. They are far from "portraits" of famous structures; rather, they are developed from excerpts from photographs that she herself shoots, most of the time from the most unbelievable perches. In the construction of her images, she manipulates views, lops stories out of skyscrapers or 'borrow' buildings from other locations for didactic/rhetorical purposes. As she formulates and poses new provocative queries, she draws from a library of preferred images that she mines as much, if not more, for their emotive weight and formal qualities as for their use as records of particular sites. In recent work such as Duality (1993) and Turbulence (1993), in which steam is featured as the protagonist, Behnke studies the dualities between culture (what man imposes on nature) and things untouched by the hand of man.

The luminous True Romance (1994, Seavest Collection) plays with language and with the contrasts of artificial and natural light, with the old and the new. The sweep of the marquee and the reminiscence of movie classics and happy endings - touched off by the nearby old-fashioned buildings - tug nostalgically at our romantic core. Such warmth and sentiment is all too often repressed by the demands of a political correctness that goes hand in hand with our late twentieth-century life-style - symbolized by the modern towers, that, though bathed in the late afternoon Philadelphia light, persist in dominating the skyline with cool iridescence. BehnkeÕs old NY neighborhood appears in the predella, a quiet nocturne illuminated by artificial light viewed from an apartment window. The modest surroundings remind us of the unwavering persistence of the simple comforts of home and normal routines that endure even in the face of such sweeping changes in societal mores as those represented by the emotional and visual high points presented in the main panel.

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, revised "Get Real" John Baeder essay, April 12, 2000.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications