JANICE HAEFNER

(American, 1914-1988)

PIERROT IN BLUE

Oil on Canvas

26 x 38 Inches

Signed Lower Right, "Haefner"

Additionally Signed, Verso, with Artist Address

 

This life-time member of the Pacific Art League lived in Los Altos, Palo Alto and Carmel where she painted and exhibited with success for over fifty years.

 

A substantial figural oil showing a dramatic frontal view of a young man dressed in the costume of the stock member of the Commedia dell'arte. The artist offers us a bold, forward perspective on this traditional theatrical character that successive art movements over the centuries have adapted in different ways to fill their evolving needs. The Symbolists saw Pierrot as a lonely fellow-sufferer, crucified upon the rood of soulful sensitivity, his only friend the distant moon; the Modernists converted him into a Whistlerian subject for canvases devoted to form and color and line. Over time, Pierrot has become an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the famously alienated artist, and caustic observer, of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pierrot's often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—have conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the Commedia dell'arte and into the larger realm of myth inhabited by Everyman.