The crown has teeth: Deborah Buck’s ‘New Jewels at Pen + Brush

The first woman waiting inside Pen + Brush wears a crown and looks capable of biting the hand that bestowed it. Deborah Buck’s New Jewels had already seized me among the press images; quite fittingly, its namesake canvas is also the initial confrontation in this retrospective. Nothing about the introduction is polite. She crouches beneath enormous gold baubles, her expression suspended between curtsy, grimace and private joke. Sour violets, chalky white and brutal black contour beckon with the lurid magnetism of a circus sideshow. Bold, uncomfortable, oddly beautiful and almost guttural, these portraits carry Baltimore’s streetwise audacity into the supposedly civilized precincts of oil paint. That jolt reaches the nervous system before the intellect can arrange a respectable interpretation. Curated by Summer Guthery, the survey spans four decades, widening from solitary “Bad Girls” imprisoned within velvety darkness to immense collaged civilizations. Gradually, a consequential questi