The human form is one of the great creative motifs, and beginning tonight, the Telluride Gallery of Fine Arts presents a show devoted to it. It’s a group show of nudes – a good fit, says gallery assistant Michelle Curry Wright. “We’ve been doing more group shows,” she explains, “because it’s easier to please more people with them, and we get to have more fun putting them together.” The works on display are of three gallery artists – a painter and two photographers – at the peak of their powers.

Painter Malcolm Liepke agreed to paint seven nudes for this show. Liepke is known for his figurative work – “very stylized and provocative,” in the words of Curry Wright – which fits the theme of this show perfectly. Liepke finds his subjects by looking around at who interests him and, often, snapping a photo or drawing up a sketch to use as a jumping off point for his composition. He paints on a wet canvas, just like his “heroes” John Singer Sargeant and the great Spanish painter Velazquez; Liepke traveled to the Prado to study his work. His figures are enticing and sensual – and that’s when they’re fully dressed. Liepke has described himself and his art as emotional, but “I try to make it as direct as I can – I try not to get in the way of the emotions,” he has said. “We all have the same basic needs for connection, love and understanding. I try to reach those universal needs…I try to say it through mood, color, atmosphere and texture.”

Jerry Uelsmann, also on display at the Gallery, has been described as a “surrealist” photographer. He assembles his poetic images from multiple negatives, and began doing so long before Adobe invented Photoshop. Uelsmann does only one-of-a-kind prints, assembled only by him (he does not use an assistant). “The idea that the creative gesture in photography was when you clicked the shutter was popular when I was a graduate student,” Uelsmann has said. But “I had become restless with trying to find an image that satisfied me in camera.” That led Uelsmann to begin “exploring some of the options in the darkroom…but when I went to New York to show people what I was doing, they would be excited and say, “It’s very, very interesting, but it’s not photography. At the time, photography’s highest form was seen in the work of photographers like Paul Strand, [Ansel] Adams and Weston.” Today, Uelsmann is considered one of the greats; critic Hilton Kramer has called the photographer’s work full of “technical mastery and…flawless confidence in…the inspired energies of the imagination.” Uelsmann’s work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as numerous private collections.

The late German photographer Ruth Bernhard, whose work is also on display, has a connection to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Adams called Bernhard “the greatest photographer of the nude,” and Bernhard often cited a random encounter with Weston in Santa Monica in 1935 as a moment that changed her life. Bernhard’s nudes “have no feeling of voyeurism” about them whatsoever, says Fine Arts Gallery Director Baerbel Hacke. An interviewer once remarked to Bernhard that for some people, anything that involves the nude is vulgar. The photographer replied crisply, “Yes, for them everything will be a dirty picture. And that means the Lord made a terrible mistake that were we born nude.” To Bernhard and her many admirers, nudes were beautiful. “To create beauty is maybe the very best thing we know how to do. In our relationships to the world and to other people, maybe we fail, but it doesn’t need to show in our work,” she said. She died in 2006 at age 101; by that point, the Fine Arts Gallery had represented her for nearly 10 years. Bernhard had arranged to donate most of her negatives to Princeton University upon her passing, but she did ask Hacke to find a suitable resting place in her native Berlin for “In the Box, Horizontal, 1962,” one of her most famous photos, of a woman stretched out in a rectangular box, clad only in a headband. Hacke complied, and placed the photograph with the Berlinische Galerie, the State of Berlin’s permanent collection of art, photography and architecture. “It was such a delight to work with her,” Hacke said of her friend. The exhibit is up until September 6.



Victor Wooten at the Wilkinson

The Jazz Festival is this weekend, and one special guest will be playing a place where you don’t have to ante up for a ticket. Bass player Victor Wooten, a five-time Grammy Award winner (last year, Rolling Stone voted him “one of the top 10 bassists of all time”), is swinging by the Wilkinson Library for some jazz on the patio this Saturday at 4 p.m. Wooten was recruited by library program coordinator Scott Doser. Doser is a drummer. In another life, pre-Wilkinson, Doser owned a sound company; he worked the stage for Wooten at a show in Elks Park, helping to set up equipment, place microphones, and (naturally) check the sound. The bassist and the librarian have kept in touch; they first met, and still run into each other each year, at the National Association of Music Merchandisers, a confab in Los Angeles. “I always catch his performances,” Doser said. “In my opinion, he’s one of the most outstanding bass players alive. Apart from that, he’s also one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet.” Wooten is not only a talented bassist; he’s also a fine singer and songwriter. It should be a terrific show. Asked if he’d like to jam with Wooten, Doser didn’t miss a beat: “I’d love to some day.”