Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Daniel Shank Cruz (bio) Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer Edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Palmer Museum of Art of the Pennsylvania State University, 2020. xx + 225 pp. $39.95 paperback. Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer is a hybrid exhibition catalogue and essay collection published to accompany a show of the Rohrers' work that was supposed to take place in several Pennsylvania venues in 2020, but has been delayed due to the pandemic. The book is edited by three scholars affiliated with Penn State: Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a Mennonite poet and essayist; Christopher Reed, an art historian and literary critic; and Joyce Henri Robinson, the assistant director of Penn State's Palmer Museum of Art, where the exhibition was scheduled to debut. The book celebrates the Rohrers, a Mennonite couple who have made significant contributions to their respective creative fields in both Pennsylvania and the broader world. Each was one of the first Mennonites to do so. Warren Rohrer was a painter (1927–1995) whose art has been exhibited in numerous prestigious venues such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jane Rohrer is a poet (born 1928) whose work appears in two collections, Life After Death (2002) and Acquiring Land (2020), as well as periodicals such as The American Poetry Review. The book contains reproductions of more than seventy of Warren's paintings sprinkled throughout, and the book's final section is a collection of thirteen of Jane's poems. Both selections span their creators' careers, and the book includes about a dozen photographs of the couple as well. Aside from the Rohrers' work, the book includes nine original chapters [End Page 232] plus the first examination of Warren's work in a mainstream art periodical, Steven Z. Levine's 1983 Arts Magazine essay. The chapters attempt to give readers a sense of the tension in the Rohrer's work caused by their sectarian religious background and their participation in secular, "worldly" fields by examining how the couple's work relates to these contexts. As Janneken Smucker writes in her chapter, "Neither Warren nor Jane found satisfying ways to negotiate the limits and boundaries that defined their [Mennonite] culture," but their art helped them to "survive" (79). Kasdorf and Reed begin the collection with an introduction that establishes the importance of Pennsylvania's geography, of the Rohrers' abandoned Mennonite faith, and of their collaborative marriage for their work. Following the introduction, there is a chapter by Reed that examines Warren's abstract painting within the broader context of the art world, focusing on the Modernist emphasis on the past that runs through his work, and a chapter by Kasdorf that recounts Jane's biography and describes how she began her poetic career in her forties during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Kasdorf highlights the importance of themes such as sexual desire, loss, and travel in Jane's work. The book's range of other contributors exemplifies its interdisciplinary nature. Historian Janneken Smucker examines Warren's work in relationship to Amish quilts, which utilize a similar plain aesthetic (the Amish split from Mennonites in 1693) and came to prominence as collectibles in the art world around the same time that Warren's work began gaining critical attention. Another historian, Sally McMurry, writes about changes in the farming landscapes of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania throughout the twentieth century. Warren grew up in the county and the Rohrers lived on a Lancaster farm for several decades of their marriage, and much of Warren's work references this space. McMurry quotes Warren's observation that "[t] he fact that my work looks different than most New York painters [sic] has to have something to do with the fact that what I see is different than what New York painters see" (98). Her chapter is one of the book's standouts because of how it treats the physical landscape that affects the emotional landscape of Warren's work, and to some extent...