Once Upon A Time
By Kimberly Straub
From maritime legends to forbidden romances to supernatural thrillers, there is nary a tale the painter Hernan Bas hasn't told. This month, his dreamy tableaux of demons, demigods, and dandies travel to the Brooklyn Museum, as part of "Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection," a survey of the first ten years of the artist's career. Like Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik, the 30-year-old Florida native pulls from a cornucopia of pop and historical subjects, but his style is unequivocally his own: "I start out painting like I'm from the fifties in New York, " he says. "But the result ends up looking like French symbolism from the 1800s."