b'on her signature Sheep Meadow motif, with the distant pale skyline observed, as almost always, through a latticework of overhanging leaves observed against the light. Obscured in part at this stage under a white wash extending across the middle of the composition, the multitude of quickly rendered sunbathers and picnickers on outspread blankets is roughly comparable to the water lilies situated beyond weeping willow branches in some of Monets late murals. (On several occasions Janet and I have discussed our experiences of visiting the Nymphas murals enshrined at the Orangerie in Paris.) For the time being, chunks of the intense green foreground in Janets underway composition are outlined with tape where she intends to scrape down the surface and begin again. But even at this stage, she has attached the word Spring twice as bold collage, once along the left edge, once along the right, the words cursive letters shaped with neon tubing, the way letters are shaped for the 1960s neon word works by Bruce Naumann. Related to the soundtracks in other multimedia works, the neon words quite literally incorporate verbal poetry into this image in gestation. It is most of all Janets ideas for a new soundtrack that remain to be resolved in order nally to complete a never-yet exhibited version of Tango, begun nearly a dozen years ago. Indeed, she began this smaller version of Tango, composed of six portable sections, before she began the acclaimed larger version exhibited so successfully in 2013 at the Museum of the City of New York with a video projection accompanied by a soundtrack of tangos. At that time, Janet considered using the same sort of soundtrack for this smaller version. Both paintings show John Quincy Adams Wards 1872 statue of Shakespeare bordered with towering trees while a summertime Central Park milonga is under way around its base. Her video projection features couples of every sort, often observed close-up, older dancers with younger ones, racially diverse duos, all complicit in a wonderfully mismatched display, considering the lack of any connection between the tango andtheveneratedElizabethandramatistandpoet.ConcernedthatShakespearespresiding presence as an image in her painting might be lost on viewers of the small version, Janet has begun to add gold leaf accents along the edges of Wards statue at the center, and accents in palladium silver leaf to the full moon at the right. And sometimes she talks about a new soundtrack with Shakespeares famous words to be given equal prominence with the rhythmically pulsing music. CHARLES STUCKEY is an independent scholar living in New York City, after a distinguished career as a curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. He helped organize major retrospective exhibitions on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Paul Gauguin, and Claude Monet, and he has published major articles and catalog essays on Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and Marcel Duchamp. For his work, he was awarded a knighthood in the Lgion dhonneur in 1997. His essay, Every Day in the Park with Janet was included in the monograph Gatherings, by Janet K. Ruttenberg, published by Pointed Leaf Press in 2013. In 2019, he helped to organize a major exhibition of her works at ArtYard, in Frenchtown, New Jersey. OPPOSITEDetail of Small Tango with video projection . 8485'