"Life, Death Themes Rooted in Webb's Alert, Intricate Art"

PERSPECTIVES

Half a century's worth of Nancy Webb's pen-and-ink drawings of figures, flora, and fauna are on view in the Boston Public Library's Wiggin and South galleries, in a show that will dazzle fans of fine draftsmanship. Her themes are nothing short of life and death, emphasis on the latter: birds that lie limp and inert; leaves that curl; fish bones that remain after the rest of the animal is long gone. A sense of elegy and the inexorable passing of time pervades these works that extend the art historical tradition of memento mori.

Webb traces her fascination with death and skeletal remains to growing up as the daughter of a surgeon. But there's a mystical aspect, as well. ``My interest is not simply in the fact that these things are dead,'' she writes in the show's little catalog, ``but in the mysterious power that is retained within their intricate and violated structures.''

She loves roots, both for their convoluted shapes and their suggestion of stability and growth, which she thwarts in drawings of uprooted plants, including a 1987 crop of ``Flying Cabbages.'' As that subject suggests, there's an occasional whiff of humor in her art.

In a 1996 tour de force called ``Sunflower Roots,'' the flowers have been yanked out of the earth and are ascending, as if they were figures in a Last Judgment scene, disinterred and bound for heaven. Some of the blossoms have already flown right out of the picture; only their stems and roots remain. One that straggles behind scatters a shower of soil in its wake. Webb has such control that this dirt suggests the delicacy of the shower of gold Jupiter used to impregnate Danae.

Among the earliest works in the show are 1950s woodcuts. Bold, blunt, and heavily outlined, their subjects include babies surrounded by, or growing out of, foliage. ``Into the Dangerous World I Leapt,'' a 1955 woodcut whose title is borrowed from William Blake, is about the birth of Webb's first child. The grimacing infant's umbilical cord grows into a tree; the work feels raw and vulnerable, the slashing lines of woodcut underscoring the pain of the subject.

The drawings that followed these prints are cooler and more detailed, the intricate textures of plants and animals often set off by blank, white, horizonless backgrounds. There's no sense of conscious composition here; Webb appears to let her plants have their own way, even if that means allowing the roots of rose bushes to plummet through space. ``The best drawings draw themselves,'' she writes.

Her drawings have a more alive and alert presence than the prints, and the pen and ink drawings outsparkle a more subdued, mellow -- and conventional -- graphite drawing of tulips.

Webb is a versatile artist. In the 1950s she did a stint as art director of Noonday Press -- her husband was part owner -- which gave her the chance to design book jackets for the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer. She has written and illustrated children's books, some of which are in the BPL show, along with a sampling of her exquisite small bronzes of animals. ``I always draw, but sculpture has captured my heart,'' she writes. ``The solidity, the weight, the thereness of sculpture totally engages me.'' She's also done public art projects: 100 bronze tiles for the floor of the Alewife Station of the MBTA's Red Line, meant to be polished by the hundreds of feet tramping over them daily; bronze bugs, beetles, and butterflies for Charles Park in East Cambridge. Also in the BPL show are samples of her personal Christmas cards, which will make you itch to get on her list.

``Nancy Webb: A Retrospective of Drawings'' is at the Library through Sept. 28. Besides offering a generous sampling of the work of a fine Boston-based artist, the exhibition is an occasion to celebrate the good efforts of the BPL's Print Department, which, over the years, has collected works on paper by almost 1,000 living artists with ties to Boston, Webb among them.

--Christine Temin, Boston Globe Staff
7/29/1998, Page F1
Section: Arts and Film