Good art schools, contrary to the received wisdom, are good for more than just getting rock bands together. The Museum of Fine Arts — it’s easy to forget — has a school attached to it. And it has quite a history.
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts has played a role in the formation of some extraordinary creative figures, from Cy Twombly to Richard Scarry, from Edmund Tarbell to Ellsworth Kelly, and from Joan Jonas to David Lynch.
Hoping to consolidate its glorious past with an ongoing series of exhibitions that honor SMFA graduates of (roughly) the past decade, the MFA has mounted a show of paintings by 1998 graduate Kristin Baker. It’s not only the first in the series. It’s also Baker’s first solo show in a US museum and the first show proposed and mounted by the MFA’s new senior curator of contemporary art, Jen Mergel.
All in all, it’s not a bad way to kick things off. It’s rather small — just four paintings. But three of them are big and one is huge, and each one bristles with ambition.
Baker was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1975, lives in Brooklyn, and shows with Deitch Projects in New York. She grew up immersed in car-racing culture. Her father became a racer, and she later made her reputation with paintings that suggested the speed and fragmentation of hurtling metal — beautiful disaster.
Tires, race tracks, crowds, and car parts appear in her paintings as glimpses of a reality drowned out by sensation — the sensation of speed, color, movement, and fragmentation, all of it coalescing into colorful abstract patterns on canvas.
Her obvious antecedents were the Cubists and their mad Italian brethren, the Futurists, whose aim was to “exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap,’’ and to “hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.’’ This from the poet Filippo Marinetti, whose most famous claim was that “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the ‘Victory of Samothrace.’ ’’
Certainly Baker’s energized canvases and bright, splintered colors seem to reprise at least the spirit of Marinetti’s 1909 call to action. But one wonders if, as the daughter of a race-car driver, her vivid images were not also complicated by fear, by the need to exorcise a premonition of disaster.