Exhibit Shows Artist Club’s Progressive Past

She was a girl sitting for a portrait, but with Isabel, painter Josephine Miles Lewis displayed the fire portraitist’s ability to render in oil pigments something of the personality of the subject — her curiosity, her intelligence.

She’s a girl about to speak, and she has something to say.

Lewis was a very early member of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club, established in 1900 and now the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue called ​“Capturing Life and Beauty: Women Artists of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club.” The illuminating show, which runs now through July 27, functions as a celebration of both the women in New Haven’s art scene past and present, and the club itself, which admitted women from the beginning and thus became an early bastion of progressivism. Women could join the New Haven Paint and Clay Club 20 years before they had the right to vote in the United States.

The exhibit itself, curated by Tanya Pohrt, wisely organizes the show not simply by chronology, but by subject matter. After highlighting the paintings of Lewis and Elizabeth Koll Luquiens — both of whom exhibited work in the club for about four decades of the first half of the 20th century — the show moves through art that deals with the natural world, with the built environment, with portraiture, and at last, with the imagination.

The show’s organizing principles illustrate not only the development of the club over time, but the wide ways in which the club’s female membership ranged from subject to subject, whether a salt pond outside the city or a place that could only exist in someone’s head. Like Lewis, Luquiens — Lewis’s contemporary — worked in a mostly realist mode, though with enough touches to give a sense of the artist’s feelings toward the scene, its sweltering heat and its cooling shade.

Fast forward a few decades and the artist’s viewpoint becomes that much stronger, as in Constance LaPalombara’s painting Complexity. The shapes of the buildings are familiar to New Haveners, but LaPalombara’s eye renders them a bit more abstract. She makes them into puzzle pieces, and lets us see how they fit together to form a whole.

Among a few highly realistic paintings and drawings from nature — perhaps most striking, Alexandra Schulz’s Eleven Voles, an exquisitely detailed image of 11 dead voles lined up in a row — Charlotte Alling’s Fish uses simplified forms to create a sculpture that conveys the creatures’ movement through water. They’re two fish jockeying for position, maybe to get a piece of floating food, maybe to hide from predators, or maybe for some more complicated reason than we typically give fish credit for.

Similarly, Susan B. Johnson’s Flame can, from certain angles, almost look like a magically frozen lick of heat, even though it doesn’t betray the heavy material it’s made from.

In the realm of portraiture, Alfonsina Betancourt’s Mother’s Day shows a departure from the more traditional portraiture that begins the show not just by making the image more impressionistic, but by including elements that make it impossible for the viewer not to try to guess what the story is — what is going on that led to this scene. Is it a scene of grief? Or is it humor? Could it be a bit of both. The portrait’s aggressive ambiguity creates a scene that seems at once full of personality and also beguilingly withdrawing. We’re not given nearly enough information to know how the subject of the painting got into her situation, or even what the situation is, but we still want to know.

The energy in the previous pieces sets the stage for the fantastical images that close out the show, such as Rachel Carlson’s mesmerizing Ascending, Descending. Especially once the eye reads the dress as actually holding a human form — possibly an invisible person? or does the dress somehow remember the shape of its absent wearer? — the image is ripe with portent and also nicely inscrutable. It offers no easy answers, but much to be taken in by.

It’s fitting in some ways that among these final images is Nancy Eisenmann’s Road Trip. which starts off ominous at first glance but becomes less so as you attend to the painting’s details — the energy latent in the clouds, the sense of the car’s speed warping the road in front of it. As the New Haven Paint and Clay Club heads well into its second century, Eisenmann’s paintings reminds us that we don’t know what lies around the next curve, but we’d better get ready, because we’re heading in that direction — fast.

“Capturing Life and Beauty: Women Artists of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club” runs at the New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave., through July 27. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.