Entwined Mysteries

This appeared on Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007


The late Tom Bostelle’s paintings carry with them quite an air of mystery, it seemed to me on a recent visit to the Chester County Art Association’s building up the street from the Daily Local News.

The association has mounted a retrospective of the Pocopson-based artists’ work, in conjunction with West Chester University and the Brandywine River Museum, and it’s worth a look for anyone interested in art, life and sinister men in hats. The 35 or so paintings and 20 or more sculptures that fill the association’s Mary P. Allinson Gallery give a good look at Bostelle’s career, which began in the 1940s and ended with his death in 2005. I’ve had favorite Bostelles here and there, but none of them match the quality of the one’s shown here.

There’s the glowing black and green “Self Potrait” early in the show that sets the basic structure of his work – the flat, two dimensional outlines of shadowy figures. And across the gallery from that is a whimsical “Horse From Hearsay” painting of galloping horse that shows Bostelle’s more playful side.

But what struck me most those mysterious painting of men dressed in trench coats and fedoras that evoke a sense of intrigue and bad things to come, like evil Orson Wells leaning out of a shadowed doorway in “The Third Man,” or Saul Bass’s title sequence in “Anatomy of a Murder.”

Bostelle must have been a movie fan to have captured such impressions, with titles like “Desperado,” or “The Red Detective.” Even the name of the show itself, “Out of Nowhere,” chosen from one of his poems, suggests classic 1950s noir.

It makes me wonder if he ever left the confines of his home/studio overlooking Lenape Park and drove over to the 202 Drive In Theater – that bygone outdoor movie palace of sometimes flashy and sometime family fare between West Chester and Chadds Ford on Route 202, run by Arlene May Lenz and her late husband Isaac for 35 years.

She might have inspired him in some way, since she suggests something of a mystery herself -- an educated, family oriented mother whose life’s work brought art with titles like ‘Don’t Look in the Basement” and “Zombie Horror” to a car crazy culture.

Mrs. Lenz was born in the 1920s and got a degree in psychology from Penn State back when not so many women were getting degrees in anything. She met and married Isaac after World War II, and the pair built and operated the drive in until they retired, she wrapping herself in Girl Scouting activities when not at the drive-in..

Anyone who was alive in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s probably has a drive-in memory, but mine are soaked in a cloud of mystery. It was always dark outside, you were surrounded by strange people, and something bad was always about to happen on screen.

I mention Mrs. Lenz only because word came this week that she had died at 84 at her daughter’s home in West Chester. There is no word on whether she and Bostelle ever met but, for now, they’re entwined in my mind.

You can read more about Bostelle at www.tombostelle.com, and more about the 202 Drive In at www.cinematreasures.org