March 9, 2006 Issue                                               

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Gallery exhibit intoxicating
Bartender serves up artistic cocktail on Hill
by MARIE FOWLER

“If I can handle Friday Happy Hour at the bar,” artist, educator and former bartender Marcy Abhau assured parents when she applied for a position at the University City New School in 1980, “I can handle your children!”

Behind Bars, currently on view at the Catherine Starr Gallery, Germantown Avenue and Gravers Lane, through the end of March, invites viewers to belly up to the bar and share a beer with famous characters from pop culture, literature, music, and the theater. Abhau’s oils glow with the candlelit atmosphere of a smoky bar. Abhau has taken the café scene popularized by Edouard Manet and the French Impressionist-era painters and added a shot of pure Marcel Duchamp. The result is a delightfully intoxicating cocktail that stirs the senses and teases the intellect.

The irreverent Abhau sets up drinks for Mona Lisa, Mother Teresa, Scarlett and Rhett, even Aunt Jemima.

In a corner, Vladimir and Estragon Ask the Bartender, Again, If He Has Seen Their Friend. Peanuts’ ‘psychiatrist’ Lucy Puts Up Her Shingle while George and Martha Play ‘Get the Guest.’ Here are Romeo and Juliet On Their First Date as the jaded Picasso Wonders Which One of His Wives He’s With, much as viewers have pondered the same thing when considering his cubist conundrums. While The Three Musketeers Fight Over Who Will Pay the Tab, The Queen of Hearts Orders a Sidecar and Asks the Bartender What Happened to Her Tarts. God Counts His Change, Jack the Ripper Asks Where the Ladies’ Room Is and Lucifer Buys a Drink for Everyone in the House. No wonder It Begins to Dawn on Dorothy That She’s Not in Kansas Anymore.

Marcy in front of her painting where as the bartender, she is a mime for Halloween. Below: “The Bolshoi Ballet at the Barre,” very reminiscent of the works of the great French Impressionists, now at the Starr Gallery, Germantown Avenue and Gravers Lane. (Photos by Marie Fowler)

“I wanted to paint these paintings for 30 years,” the obviously witty Abhau vows. The works, in both large and small scale (“I think of the little ones as baseball cards,” Abhau smiles), are painted “from memory, without models.”

She hearkens back to her grad school days behind the bar at La Terrasse, 34th and Sansom Streets. “Bartending socialized me. When I first came to Philadelphia, I was very shy, intimidated. I was afraid to go into a store and buy a doughnut. I didn’t know a knish from Danish.”

Abhau says she was never really “hired” at La Terrasse. (And this is a confession from someone who once quit, gave notice and got fired all in the same morning.) A bewildered maitre d’ ascertained Abhau had slung fried eggs at a luncheonette downtown and pointed her toward some tables. Thus her career serving Salad Nicoise, French onion soup and Beaujolais, not to mention a charming series of paintings, was launched.

“La Terrasse had everybody,” Abhau recalls, “academics, preppies, crazy people; one guy who sniffed keyholes up and down the block, Judy’s dog drinking martinis at the bar (then-owner Judy Wicks) and 80-year-old Gertrude, playing Ragtime piano.

“Every bar has its regulars. You know who’s married. A married couple came to Happy Hour every day, and then the guy turns up with another woman. His wife was our friend, and we were angry. You pretend the bimbo isn’t there, but we were really, really ticked off … La Terrasse was a beautiful, empty bar - no TV.”

Abhau dispenses another bit of wisdom from behind the bar. “We’re careful about last call,” she confides, noting the horror when lights come up quickly and harshly. “You see everything — acne, dandruff, disheveled hair. People want to crawl back under a rock. But if you’re a good tipper, we put the lights up gently.

“One evening I was bouncing when none of the regular bouncers showed up,” Abhau says “and a cabbie came up, looking for Mr. Irving. I ran inside stopping at every table, ‘Are you Mr. Irving?’ Turned out he was looking for Mr. Hoving - Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The staff had been catering to him all night,” Abhau winces, unable to forget Hoving’s annoyance. “Liv Ullman came in when she was performing at the Annenberg Center.the Dallas Cowboys.”

But when Abhau looked back at the bar 30 years later, the artist in her knew it would be more fun to paint real cowboys. “People dress so boringly today,” the painter laments.

Abhau is a realist. “My vaunted art teachers would say, ‘Marcy, you can’t paint this way.’ It’s narrative, illustrational, funny, so naughty, worse than porn.”

Abhau grew up as a Navy Junior, moving from coast to coast, the daughter of an Admiral who was the first-cousin of H.L. Mencken, writer and political commentator known as the “Sage of Baltimore.” Mencken advised my father “not to have any boy children,” Abhau remembers, amused. “Boys are obnoxious, always bringing worms into the house, torturing dogs. So it was only my elder sister and I.”

Abhau’s father was her first mentor. “He made me curious about the world,” she continues. Although he had a rigorous technical education at Baltimore Polytechnic and the Naval Academy, Abhau recalls her father as “an eccentric, more like a history professor at a small college than a Naval Officer. When we drove across country, we’d get out at places like the Grand Canyon and my father would explain plate tectonics.”

Abhau herself heeded Mencken’s advice about boy children. Her only child, 17-year-old Anna, is a junior at Friends Select. Star-struck early, Anna has acted for the past six years with the McGuffin Theater and Film Lab, run by John Rae of Chestnut Hill. Named for H. L. Mencken’s mother, Anna Abhau, the young star has played the Devil in Damn Yankees and Dogbury in Much Ado About Nothing.

It’s hardly surprising Anna’s an actress. How many other teens have mothers who call the sick line at school to report, not a sore-throat or flu, but an abduction by pirates instead?

“I tried not to be an artist,” Abhau insists. She enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. “Penn was Dad’s idea. It wasn’t even on my list. I didn’t know what Ivy League meant. I was a public school kid, and suddenly I encountered rich private school kids.

“It was a time of conflict,” Abhau adds, recounting the anti-war protests and psychedelic scene. “Dad was one of the few people I trusted and he was part of the Military-Industrial Complex. It was hard … I thought I wanted to be a writer. I still love to write - not professionally, but I’m a great letter-writer. Okay, maybe mostly e-mail now, but I occasionally get a stamp. I take it really seriously. Maybe it’s the H. L. Mencken thing.

“I was told at Penn that it would take 10 or 15 or 20 years to develop as an artist. You have to paint and paint and paint and paint. It’s not going to be any fun. You are frustrated. You feel stupid. You don’t recognize it when it comes.”

Abhau has spent most of her professional career in education, though rarely as an art teacher. At the University City New School, she taught math, science, language arts to third through sixth graders, until the lease was lost.

The enormously clever Abhau wrote plays for her students about building the pyramids and the saga of the Trojan War. It was “corny, vaudevillian, Borscht Belt humor which kids didn’t get. but I knew the parents would. I made them do hard things like using a magnifying glass to draw stamps for social studies. I told them they couldn’t have lunch until they were done. We made a jigsaw papier mache map of the world, so they could understand how the continents fit together.”

Abhau worked five years on her Behind Bars series. During that time, she lost both parents, ended a long-term relationship and relocated from Manayunk to “a fabulous rowhouse in Mt. Airy. Monday morning quarterbacking told me it was time to paint, unencumbered,” the artist reflects.

While our naughty artist may have found the conception of Behind Bars a delicious comedy, finding a gallery to show the work was quite difficult, and she finally refused to continue playing gallery-roulette, knowing there are 600 artists standing behind her, portfolio in hand, willing to “pay to play.”

Tired of being treated in a cavalier fashion by the art establishment, Abhau plans to chart a new course. This coming fall, already armed with both a BFA and an MFA from Penn as well as years of additional studio work, she will embark on graduate study in art therapy at Hahnemann. “I want to do somebody some good before I die,” Abhau vows.”

She need not wait until Fall. Stroll into the Starr Gallery and you’ll find your spirits brightened at once. And don’t miss Abhau’s rear-view mirror series. Scavenged from the junkyard, ordinary mirrors become miniature works of art. Like the Admiral, I, too, am baffled - why is such ingenuity and creativity not more widely applauded? Thank goodness for Catherine Starr’s vision.

The next image on Abhau’s rear-view mirror should be the tradition-bound galleries she’s left behind.

The Catherine Starr Gallery, 8401 Germantown Avenue at Graver’s Lane, may be reached by telephone at 215-248-5878 or 267-251-6493. Hours are Wednesday through Friday, noon to 5, Saturday from 11 to 5, and Sunday from noon to 4.