Ask about the story of Noah, and most think of the flood, an ark and animals walking two-by-two.
Artist Lynda Caspe recalls Noah’s drunkenness and castration.
The painter, sculptor and poet, whose latest exhibition opens at the gallery of the Manhattan Borough president on April 1, depicts scenes from the Old Testament in bronze sculpture and reliefs, often focusing on marginal biblical women as well as Caspe’s interpretations of lesser-known aspects of familiar tales. In her piece “Castration of Noah,” Caspe depicts an interpretation of a biblical episode in which the violent ploy by one of Noah’s son prevented the patriarch from fathering more children, thereby keeping his prospective inheritance intact.
“Greed,” said Caspe from her Tribeca loft. “He didn’t want any less than a third of the Earth.”
Caspe, 75, dressed in a black fur vest and leather pants, with stark white hair, appears bold, a presence offset by her genial demeanor and frequent, punctuating laugh. A lifelong New Yorker, Caspe received her M.F.A in studio art from the University of Iowa, and continued her postgraduate education in Paris, apprenticing with the prominent English printmaker Stanley William Hayter. After teaching at the University of Alberta in Canada and the University of Chicago, her undergraduate alma mater, she landed at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she taught studio art for 35 years.
“I knew you don’t make money in art,” she said. “[Teaching was] how I supported myself.”
Though much of the sculpture in her upcoming show is biblical in nature, one of her recent pieces is a self-portrait of sorts. Titled “Autobiography,” the two-foot bronze relief hangs in her studio and incorporates people from Caspe’s life. An abstract image of her father, who was a biochemist for Philip Morris, sits on the subject’s nose. A horse she rode as a child trots on her cheek.
Paintings hanging on the whitewashed brick walls of the light-drenched, 3,200 square foot loft and studio space are Caspe’s own colorful landscapes done at her country home in Meredith, New York.
“Except for the Picasso over there,” she said. She bought the black lithograph print in Paris for $25 as a gift for her father, she said.
The apartment décor is eclectic —a red velvet couch and emerald velvet armchair, with slight tears in the fabric, look as if they were salvaged from an antique store. And her bedroom door is still plastered with magazine cutouts of ‘90s football stars from when her son Daniel, now 35, inhabited the quarters.
Caspe purchased her apartment in 1974 with a $7,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She knows she was smart, and a bit lucky, to buy when she did. Caspe has seen friends and fellow artists move out of the neighborhood over the years because of rising rents and landlord pressure.
Caspe has retired from teaching and focuses wholly on her own work. She shows frequently, even without gallery representation, and sometimes through serendipitous meetings: she twice showed at her neighborhood bank, an opportunity that came about when she went in to open a checking account. As a member of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, she exhibits in group shows, which led her to the gallery at the borough president’s office. Last fall she exhibited in a show featuring work by the founding members of Bowery Gallery, an artists’ cooperative she helped form in 1969 that still has a gallery in Chelsea.
Caspe’s interest in biblical stories began in 2007, when she curated a show for the gallery at Tribeca Synagogue. The stories appeal to her because of their commentary on human nature, and, depending on the viewer’s perspective, her interpretations reveal either a cynical or frank view of humanity.
“I don’t think people have changed at all,” she said. “We’re just like we were in the cave.”