gloss. : Bumbeck, Take 4.

Artist David Bumbeck's reputation as a master of intaglio and bronze work precedes the viewer into his retrospective at Middlebury College's Museum of Art, permeating everything from the stylized lighting to the monolithic curved wall separating the entrance (and the viewer) from the body of the collection. Emblazoned with Museum Director Emi Donadio's glowing review of Bumbeck's life in art, this wall serves to underscore the irreproachable feel of the show, giving it the feel of a gaudy temple dedicated to a much revered though salacious god capable of great wrath.

It isn't without reason that Bumbeck's work is so celebrated throughout the arts community: His richly executed intaglios and bronzes seem to actually rise off the canvas or gleam invitingly in the warm overhead lights of the small gallery. In piece after piece, decorative female figures beg for the viewer's attention as we crowd closer, trying to place cleverly hidden references as diverse as Gaugin and ancient Greece. The detail in Stones makes it arguably the finest of the intaglios represented: the tiny strokes give it the three-dimensional quality of a photograph, with female statues rising from the paving stones where they lie, some headless, all without arms, speechless and without action. Are these women Roman goddesses or Egyptian queens, or both? In fact, Bumbeck's awareness of art history is evident in all of his compositions: women with pre-Raphaelite curves and 18^th century sausage curls find themselves alongside stylized depictions of Artemis and recurring figures of little girls with 19^th-century toys.

Mixing styles and influences seems to be Bumbeck's trademark, but once you look past the gloss and subdued lighting, it is hard not to be disturbed by the jumble of female bodies, many of them without pupils or genuine expressions. In this respect Bumbeck's talent actually works against him, revealing such unrealistic portrayals of warped femininity that you recoil even as the skill draws you in. This is a gradual effect, as subtle as the work that went into sculpting and engraving his various interpretations of women.

In fact, it may be the aura of old-school 'authority' lent by deliberately cracking the surface of many of his works that makes this exhibit so problematic √ we are given many options, all of them impossible. The pieces in this show have been likened to 'a garden of female figures', and this idea of decorative yet alien beings is accurate in that the women on display lack both realism and personalities. Putting aside Oscar Wilde's mantra of 'art for art's sake', it becomes difficult to look at Bumbeck's work as anything but art for his own sake, beautiful but vacuous. Though he has given us images we are familiar with, his presentation has made them into controversial art. His bronze nudes, Artemis and Starry Night, are women literally served up on pedestals, while the beautiful bust Veiled Horizon is nothing more or less than a woman's disembodied head in a box. The little girl with a hoop pops up in many of the pieces, seemingly symbolizing innocent childhood, but also carrying a feeling of menace and something irretrievably lost.Whether he intended it to or not, Bumbeck's work has raised many questions and caused a lot of controversy. Should we allow this to simply be beautiful art, or should we look deeper? When is it appropriate to do one or the other? If it succeeds in no other realm, it has certainly gotten people to talk about the nature of art. The nudes, anatomically correct twin bronzes, represent women in highly sexualized positions, with heads turned to the side, some say with pride, others with shame. Bumbeck has presented the female figure as a vacuum, a hollow, sexualized or childlike. His work is threatening in that it presents only two options for women: lost child or Galatea, a living statue or cold image possessing only form but no personality of her own. In that respect Bumbeck appears as a malevolent Pygmalion, fashioning women into bronze or lines etched on paper, heads turned away from the viewer, eyes without pupils. Traditionally a moon-goddess and virgin sister of Apollo, Artemis as rendered by Bumbeck has become a woman with her hands over her head, hips thrust forward, head turned to the side. Carved into her pedestal are the little girl and her hoop, and an almost prehistoric figure of a woman's head with a crescent moon, suggestive of early Greek representations of goddesses. This is as far as Bumbeck will go to make his sculpture relevant to her name. But Bumbeck's is not the Artemis of myth - This Artemis appears to be offering her body to the viewer. Perhaps she is confident and unashamed. Perhaps Bumbeck's "goddesses" are actually whores, embarrassed, not proud. The mysteriously named Starry Night offers a similar posture of exposure to the viewer, the Latin inscriptions on her base seeming like an afterthought, seeking to ground her simultaneously in myth and the academic, but they are easily ignored as the viewer reacts to the sculpture itself, with longing, horror, or something in between. Are these women meant to be contented in their vapidity, self-satisfied and comfortable in their own skin like favorite clothing? Perhaps they, like all of the other women in this exhibition, are merely beautiful objects, disturbing figments of Bumbeck's imagination. His figures are mysterious fantasy women- we cannot know them, but we want to know their stories, or tell their stories. 'What shall I love if not enigma?" Bumbeck is fond of asking, and in this retrospective he has presented a collection that extends that question to matters of the female form: he does not understand women and leaves them alone, preferring instead to create his own, perfect in form but puzzling in their inability to answer questions for us or their creator.

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