‘Modern Masters’ on tour
Resurrected, and revealed.
When the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., completed its six-year remodeling project in July 2006, its collection still proved too extensive for all of it to be mounted for public view.
Too many extraordinary works would not make the cut, destined to be consigned to storage.
Solution: the touring exhibition “Modern Masters From the Smithsonian American Art Museum.”
“The galleries were beautiful, but there were a lot of compelling works we simply could not put up,” recalls Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the museum.
“I could not bear to see all these works go into off-site storage. So I selected some of the paintings by important artists, people who have really shifted the way we think of American art, for a special tour,” she says. “I’m thrilled that it has been so well-received. It makes my heart glad.”
“Modern Masters” makes its sixth and final stop Oct. 7 through Dec. 31 at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Featuring 31 of the most celebrated post-war artists who came to prominence in the late 1950s, the exhibition explores the “complex and varied nature of American abstract art” through 43 pivotal paintings and sculptures selected from the Smithsonian collection.
Broad themes
Three themes dominate.
“Significant Gestures” examines “the autographic mark,” executed in sweeping strokes of vivid color that became the vehicle of expression for such luminaries as Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and others of the abstract expressionist movement.
“Optics and Order” centers on Josef Albers and his renderings of mathematical proportion and carefully balanced color, as well as on those artists who built on his ideas: Louise Nevelson, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esteban Vicente, Anne Truitt and Ad Reinhardt.
“New Images of Man” embraces the work of Larry Rivers, Nathan Oliveira, Romare Bearden, Jim Dine, David Driskell and Grace Hartigan, each of whom “searched their surroundings and personal lives for vignettes emblematic of larger universal concerns.”
The decades following World War II were a heady and transformative era in American art, a time when painters and sculptors deeply affected by the convulsions of World War II sought to grasp the range of human motivation.
“In my view, I don’t think the art of the mid-1940s until about 1960, say, could have been made before the war,” says Mecklenburg, who has published works on the art and lives of Edward Hopper, Frederick Carl Frieseke, George Bellows and others.
“It had a huge impact on these artists, some of whom fought overseas,” she says. “For this generation, it was a most horrific experience to realize that man could do what he had done to his civilization. It was overwhelming. These artists were nowhere in 1951; they were all stars by the late 1950s, and their work had a real impact.
“By the early ’60s the effect of the war was ameliorated. It was not as pressing or immediate as pop art hit the scene and took the art world, popular culture and advertising by storm.”
Abstract impulses
Mecklenburg, who also wrote the text for the accompanying catalog, “Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury,” says the three themes of the exhibition are as revealing as they are illustrative.
“I think there are three really fundamental ways that artists conceive of abstraction. The ‘Significant Gestures’ group are pieces about energy, color, vitality and movement, a way for artists to explore, in many cases, the natural forces in the physical world as well as the psychological, abstract impulses that were very much a part of the thinking in the years after World War II.
“ ‘Optics and Order’ offer paintings that are serenely beautiful, measured and ordered, and have a lot to do with logic and perception and the idea that there still is some sort of element of the rational in spite of all the horrors of the war. There is a sense of calm, and controlled energy. They are emotionally very powerful, too, but you do not respond to them immediately with your gut. Rather, you approach them in a quasi-mental, quasi-emotional way.”
“New Images of Man” reflects the reaction to a period that, for a time, saw art critics offering strong encouragement for artists to reject all remaining residue of the human figure in painting.
“But these artists, all working simultaneously,” says Mecklenburg, “were not willing to relinquish every part of the human figure and paint in pure abstraction.”
Related events
Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House harbors masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its permanent collection. It also showcases traveling and original exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings and other events.
Mecklenburg will be in Winston-Salem at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 15 to discuss highlights from the exhibition.
Apart from staff lectures and tours at Reynolda House, other events surrounding the exhibition include four “Modern Thursdays” running 4:30-8 p.m. Oct. 13 through Nov. 3.
The four evenings will focus on how the art forms of the post-war scene, among them avant-garde music, film, Beat poetry, architecture and “politically engaged” art criticism, connect to contemporary artists and intellectuals.
At 2 p.m. Oct. 9, Wake Forest University professor of music Louis Goldstein will discuss the impact of New York’s abstract expressionist painters on American composer Morton Feldman.
Visit www.reynoldahouse.org or call 336-758-5150.
