The best of the Delta

LITTLE ROCK — Something is terribly wrong.

Used to be, I could safely attend the annual Delta show at the Arkansas Arts Center with serene confidence that I would never agree with the judge’s picks. It gave me the feeling, hollow as it might be, that I marched to a different drummer from the cognoscenti’s. For my taste in such things has long been irreparably bourgeois-middle-class, middlebrow, middlin’ in general. Even verging on the sentimental, and maybe not just verging. Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, Charles Demuth’s Figure Five in Gold. The light of them, the sense of a remembered past, their almost nostalgic quality, and maybe not almost . . . I’m a sucker for it all, predictably rear-guard at avant-garde shows.

But last Thursday night, I left this year’s Delta show shaken.

The big winner was Mark Lewis’ Peoria Avenue #7, my own favorite. This year’s juror, Monica Bowman, runs a gallery called The Butcher’s Daughter (talk about bourgeois) in Ferndale, Mich., a Detroit suburb. Her pick could have been a scene along almost any interurban line-the MTA in Boston, the Long Island Railway out of Penn Station in New York, the El in Chicago once it gets out of the Loop and glides into commuterdom.

Call it John Cheever and J.D. Salinger country. And mine. For exactly one year to the day-October 1, 1966, to October 1, 1967. That’s when I was the junior editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News, and took the train out of Union Station to suburban Glenview every weekday, newspaper and briefcase in hand-another indistinguishable member of the Mad Men generation.

The older you get, the more you may want things to stay not as they are but as they used to be, at least in your not-always-reliable memory. Problem is, I felt that way when I was still young. Call it a case of premature aging. Or just arrested, even reverse, development.

Arrested time, that’s what Peoria Avenue #7 tries to capture. The same thing Bonnard was after in Marthe Entering the Room. And found. As he put it, “What I am after is the first impression-I want to show all one sees on first entering the room-what my eye takes in at first glance.” It’s a kind of sanctification of the ordinary. Marthe will forever enter that room, and we cannot keep our eyes off it. Call it a stop-time moment.

It may be a passing scene the harried commuter won’t notice, lost as he is in the transient. But it stops us cold once it’s on canvas, or, in Mark Lewis’ case, on graphite and paper, and on a big scale-60 by 84 inches. So you can study the ordinary diner, the ordinary girl, the ordinary parked car and railroad tracks under the ordinary sky, none of whichare ordinary once the artist has caught them. And us.

The difference between a place and what Walker Percy used to call a no-place may be who’s looking at it, who is able to see it. And depict it. Mark Lewis can.

Walker Percy may have written about New Orleans, to which there is no end of writing about, but he chose to live in suburban Covington, La. Maybe his eyes, his mind, his sensibility needed a rest from the picturesque, the distinctive, the New Orleanian. Yet you know that wherever Walker Percy was must have been distinctive by virtue of his being there, that it had to have a special light, like the sun setting over the Delta.

Then there are those works you know, from your first glance, have nothing ordinary about them. Anything by Carroll Cloar, for example, which always looks covered in layers of time.

There are no harried urban commuters when you’re taking U.S. 65 through the Delta to connect with 82 across The River in Mississippi. Every abandoned sharecropper shack could be a Carrol Cloar. Much like Sharecropper Shack by Beverly Buys of Hot Springs in this year’s Delta show. Or maybe James Bell’s Fresh Fish Daily-Cotton Belt 819, which takes a scene in Pine Bluff and makes it what Pine Bluff used to be so good at capturing: the past. Here’s hoping it still is. It’s an art.

The whole Delta show has a rare attraction about it this year, maybe because it seems free of the usual artspeak that so often gets in the way of the art. This year’s prize works speak for themselves, and with the kind of economy that approaches elegance. It’s a style that goes back to the era of the Art Deco, the representational art of the 1930s and ’40s with its sculpted touch, as in the Blue Eagle of the New Deal’s NRA (“We do our part”). Complete with its appeal to a populist sensibility.

If there was a germ of American fascism in that style, it also had a power that American abstraction never did. It is the spirit of an older liberalism, as in Carl Sandburg’s The People Yes-a liberalism that still allowed for individual differences and a wide range of idiosyncratic opinions, even dissent. Rather than the faceless “collective action” our current president calls for when he is being most himself, as in his latest Inaugural Address.

Do stop by this year’s Delta show at the Arts Center in Little Rock and see what you think, and if you’re as unfashionable as I am. For lagniappe, you get the whole rest of the arts center. Including what used to be the 1930ish “modern” art-deco facade of the Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, courtesy of the New Deal’s WPA. It’s still hard to top.

Those who built the present, really ordinary museum in the 1960s, not a great decade for memorable American architecture, did have the judgment to incorporate the old facade as an interior wall of the current museum. It remains newer than the new museum. The way Mark Lewis’ ordinary suburban scene, including the torn piece on its side, is anything but ordinary.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.