This review originally appeared in the New York Times on October 28, 1988, Section C, Page 30.
Review/Art; Edgar Franceschi, in Many Media
By John Russell
The eight-year retrospective of paintings, sculptures, mixed-media objects and a complete stage set by Edgar Franceschi at the Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, is an event that honors both the artist and the museum. More than one museum to the south of 104th Street could learn from the lucid, calm and spacious installation. And the work, though uneven, has high ambitions in the areas of wit, fancy and sophistication.
Mr. Franceschi, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1948, has been showing in New York since 1971, when Terry Dintenfass included him in a group exhibition. Grants have come his way (most recently from the New York State Council for the Arts). But a serious retrospective is something else altogether, and this one is well worth the trip.
Crossing the threshold, we see first a mixed-media object called ''La Creation du Monde.'' Worked up over six years, it serves as a mascot or flagship for the show as a whole. William Olander in the catalogue tells us that it includes the artist's palette ''atop a folding stool, combined with a portion of a painting, a blue bird, and something that resembles a gold box which just might belong to Pandora.''
As that suggests, the piece is dense to the point at which it is not easy to read. But while Mr. Olander's description is correct, it omits the implications of the title. In this visitor's view, what we see is not simply a collection of emblems in high favor with the artist. Nor is it about ''the creation of the world'' in an everyday sense. It has to be, and surely is, a salute to the French painter Fernand Leger, who collaborated in 1923 with the poet Blaise Cendrars and the composer Darius Milhaud on a ballet called ''La Creation du Monde.'' Except for the gold box - Leger hated gold, and Mr. Franceschi can't get enough of it - item after item in this complicated piece relates to Leger's idiom.