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| "The Father":Henk Pander dislocates a Dutch interior. |
Since arriving in Portland from Amsterdam in 1965, Henk Pander has documented the city, the state of Oregon and the American West in greater detail and with more industry than any other painter I can think of. Roger Hull didn't quite say it like that at PNCA last night, but he implied it, I think, and Pander's retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem bears out the implication. Portland cityscapes, rescue workers in eastern Oregon, abandoned relics of America's industrial production in the deserts of the West, sometimes in the same frame with a new technological marvel -- they are all there, along with Portland people, Portland still lifes and more genial Oregon landscapes. Head upstairs (until Sunday anyway, the rest of the show will be up through March 27) and his set designs for the late, great Storefront Theater and Portland Dance Theater, sketch books and more of his deft watercolors of the same subjects are on display.
Hull's lecture (and his catalog essay for the exhibition in Salem) give us an excellent starting point for considering Pander's work here since he arrived (so does Bob Hicks' review of the show in The Oregonian), but maybe they don't explain why this show -- the most complete appraisal of his career to date -- is in a small museum in Salem. And that's just another way of saying that Pander, despite his industry, skill and concern for our place and people, has always been an outsider here, rarely included in insider lists of the best Oregon artists.
We could debate that list -- what painters are more widely celebrated than Pander -- but let's not for the moment. Let's just accept that the artist who painted the official state portraits of governors McCall and Kitzhaber is still an outsider, almost 50 years after his arrival, despite the apparent incongruity. Or maybe because of the incongruity.
