Routes Toward Modernism: American Painting 1870-1950
Friday, September 13, 2002 - Sunday, December 29, 2002
Throughout the period 1870–1950, American painters were struggling to synthesize the lessons of European masters while still creating images that were meaningful for their own place and time. Over decades of trial and error, an American-flavored modernist vision developed, and this exhibition, drawn from works in the Blanton’s permanent collection, traces developments in American painting during this dramatic period of stylistic innovations and artistic breakthroughs. The exhibition begins with realist paintings by turn-of-the-century artists such as Thomas Eakins, Thomas Moran, John Twachtman, William Merritt Chase, and Robert Henri, whose figure studies, portraits and landscapes incorporate a wide range of responses to the American character. With the Armory Show of 1913, a groundbreaking exposition in New York of the latest experimental European and American works, a benchmark was established for the next generation. Routes toward Modernism next chronicles exposure to the Armory Show, as well as other first-hand encounters with the most avant-garde art of the time. Works by American modernists Max Weber, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Stuart Davis, among others, demonstrate the experimentation with compositional structure, paint handling, and the representation of imagery taking place at this time. While these artists were exploring abstraction, another loosely affiliated group of American artists, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, and Karl Zerbe, were combining vanguard aspects of realism, cubism, and expressionism in largely narrative works. The convergence of these, vastly differing bodies of work— both abstract and representational— constitutes a particularly American strategy toward and interpretation of modernism, and sets the stage for an era of radical new artistic accomplishment that develops in the post-war years.
Gallery TextIntroduction
History is never simple. Events unfold in a complex interweave of actions and responses whose significance is regarded differently from varying perspectives and in retrospect. Works of art are artifacts of history. In addition to being extraordinary objects capable of inspiring visual, intellectual, and spiritual awareness, they engage the history of ideas and embody the cultural attitudes of a given moment. Whether created in the course of studio-based inquiry, for a patron's commission, or as public works for diverse audiences, art reflects the spirit of the time in which it was made.
Routes Toward Modernism traces the development of American art during a dramatic period of stylistic innovations, artistic experimentation, and cultural upheaval. The exhibition presents a selection of works from the Blanton's collections of the 19th and 20th century American paintings that suggests intriguing dialogues between the arts and sciences, links current events and debates on national identity. Divided into three sections that compare works by artists with shared concerns, Routes charts three overlapping strategies in American art–observation, analysis, and commentary–as they are expressed in the mutually responsive languages of abstraction and representation. Over decades of artistic investigation, an eclectic, American-flavored modernist vision developed, closely tied to one of the country's most cherished democratic ideals–freedom of expression.
American Realism
American art arrived at a crossroads at the end of the nineteenth century. Based on techniques and styles borrowed from European academic traditions, American art, like the country itself, struggled to become emancipated from the time honored but strict conventions of its models. Favored academic subjects–society portraits, still lifes, and landscapes–hearkened back nostalgically to classical, Renaissance, and Baroque traditions. Yet, as the Industrial Revolution and waves of immigration rapidly expanded American cities, painters widened their scopes to include aspects of their own experiences. The heroic and romanticized landscapes typical of Thomas Moran and the Hudson River School gave way to the fin-de-siècle Post-Impression of painters like John Henry Twachtman and George Inness, whose outdoor views favored the intimate and personal. Thomas Eakins, who directed and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, guided a shift in focus from landscape to figure studies, from the universal to the particular, from the exalted to the ordinary. His use of nude models and photographic studies revolutionized the truthful capacity of painting.
Like dozens of his esteemed colleagues, William Merritt Chase imported new painting techniques–bravura brushwork and brooding colors–from his studies in Europe. Chase's portraits summarize a genteel world of privilege and convey authority, tradition, and the importance of station in life. They epitomize the lofty ideals of an expansive and idealizing civilization that treasured continuity with the past. By contrast, Robert Henri–like Chase, an influential teacher–represented a more progressive vision that deemed scenes of ordinary people, common gathering places, and everyday landscapes of American life relevant subject matter for works of art. Drawing less upon European painting precedents than upon his experience as a newsman in Philadelphia, Henri galvanized his colleagues, including George Bellows and William Glackens, into vanguard artist groups, such as The Eight and the Ashcan School. Using art as a platform for social awareness, they employed the immediacy of journalism to embrace a realism that responded to the conditions of the day as experienced by the vast majority of people. Their images, often sketched directly from the city streets, illustrated a fresh new sensibility, not so much European as American, and exuded a newfound confidence in the importance of urban life and its promises of progress for the future.
Assimilating European Modernism
As the century turned, American artists increasingly sought to express an American artistic identity. They developed multiple approaches, shifting to urban and industrial imagery, broadening the definition of landscapes, and responding to the quickening infusion of artistic styles abroad. Childe Hassam's and Maurice Prendergast's departures from French Impressionism, and Marguerite Zorach's expressive Fauvist reflections, Manierre Dawson's nod to Picasso and the Paris Cubists–each of these innovations articulated America's conflicted desire to separate from the European influence while still drawing heavily from the European sources of inspiration. Nineteenth century notions of art imbued with utilitarian purpose, class consciousness, and faithful representation gave way to a profusion of artistic styles that implied a widespread analysis of perception itself– the different ways in which we "see."
At the dawn of the twentieth century, painters struggled to understand the science, behavior, and visual properties of light, color, form, and space. Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Raymond Jonson, and Stuart Davis incorporated musical concepts and color theories into their work. Einstein's theory of relativity; atomic and quantum physics; Freud's and Jung's theories of the unconscious; the fourth dimension; and developments in electricity, optics, medicine, and transportation stimulated a burst of artistic inquiry into the nature of time, memory, and reality itself. Darwin's theories and the rediscovery of Eastern religions in the nineteenth century blossomed into myriad forms of spiritual thought. For the new modern thinker, nothing was certain and no single path was the correct one. Artists created multiple ways to examine this unsettling, invigorating, and pervasive new state of things.
Multiple Paths, Multiple Voices
Just as the Armory Show brought foreign art to New York by storm in 1913, World War I delivered the world's grievances and power struggles to America's door. By the 1930s, the Great Depression in the United States and the rumblings of Fascism in Europe encouraged many artists to probe questions of ethical and social concern. Important formal experiments continued to flourish, but at the same time, significant numbers of artists chose to define American art through a more narrative, realist approach.
American regionalist views by Peter Blume, Louis Lozowick, Charles Burchfield, and Jerry Bywaters focused attention on defining the American character through subjects that described a more localized picture: landmarks and idiosyncrasies of specific regions. Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller were interested in capturing an urban feeling–something along the lines of the "slice of life" introduced by documentary photography. By contrast, Philip Evergood, Jacob Lawrence, Raphael Soyer, and Ben Shahn were hard-hitting social critics. Karl Zerbe's quintessential modern vision, which presents a distorted female figure from a decentered and precarious point of view, demands re-examination and inquiry into how sexuality and identity are constructed. These, among many other themes, became new modern directions for American art, and they persisted and intensified through World War II and into the era of civil changes of the 1950s and 1960s.
At a glance, the concept of modernism seems to define an impulse toward validating change as a constant and verifiable condition of life. To accept change as a state of being is paradoxical and tricky–status quo, tradition, convention, and comfort are called into question. Artists from 1870 to 1950 understood and articulated in concrete form–through works of art–the transformed ways in which Americans perceived themselves and their world. Their art seems to conclude that modernity presents us not with static conditions requiring simple observation and description, but with dynamic and unpredictable interplay of circumstances and responses.
History is never simple. Events unfold in a complex interweave of actions and responses whose significance is regarded differently from varying perspectives and in retrospect. Works of art are artifacts of history. In addition to being extraordinary objects capable of inspiring visual, intellectual, and spiritual awareness, they engage the history of ideas and embody the cultural attitudes of a given moment. Whether created in the course of studio-based inquiry, for a patron's commission, or as public works for diverse audiences, art reflects the spirit of the time in which it was made.
Routes Toward Modernism traces the development of American art during a dramatic period of stylistic innovations, artistic experimentation, and cultural upheaval. The exhibition presents a selection of works from the Blanton's collections of the 19th and 20th century American paintings that suggests intriguing dialogues between the arts and sciences, links current events and debates on national identity. Divided into three sections that compare works by artists with shared concerns, Routes charts three overlapping strategies in American art–observation, analysis, and commentary–as they are expressed in the mutually responsive languages of abstraction and representation. Over decades of artistic investigation, an eclectic, American-flavored modernist vision developed, closely tied to one of the country's most cherished democratic ideals–freedom of expression.
American Realism
American art arrived at a crossroads at the end of the nineteenth century. Based on techniques and styles borrowed from European academic traditions, American art, like the country itself, struggled to become emancipated from the time honored but strict conventions of its models. Favored academic subjects–society portraits, still lifes, and landscapes–hearkened back nostalgically to classical, Renaissance, and Baroque traditions. Yet, as the Industrial Revolution and waves of immigration rapidly expanded American cities, painters widened their scopes to include aspects of their own experiences. The heroic and romanticized landscapes typical of Thomas Moran and the Hudson River School gave way to the fin-de-siècle Post-Impression of painters like John Henry Twachtman and George Inness, whose outdoor views favored the intimate and personal. Thomas Eakins, who directed and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, guided a shift in focus from landscape to figure studies, from the universal to the particular, from the exalted to the ordinary. His use of nude models and photographic studies revolutionized the truthful capacity of painting.
Like dozens of his esteemed colleagues, William Merritt Chase imported new painting techniques–bravura brushwork and brooding colors–from his studies in Europe. Chase's portraits summarize a genteel world of privilege and convey authority, tradition, and the importance of station in life. They epitomize the lofty ideals of an expansive and idealizing civilization that treasured continuity with the past. By contrast, Robert Henri–like Chase, an influential teacher–represented a more progressive vision that deemed scenes of ordinary people, common gathering places, and everyday landscapes of American life relevant subject matter for works of art. Drawing less upon European painting precedents than upon his experience as a newsman in Philadelphia, Henri galvanized his colleagues, including George Bellows and William Glackens, into vanguard artist groups, such as The Eight and the Ashcan School. Using art as a platform for social awareness, they employed the immediacy of journalism to embrace a realism that responded to the conditions of the day as experienced by the vast majority of people. Their images, often sketched directly from the city streets, illustrated a fresh new sensibility, not so much European as American, and exuded a newfound confidence in the importance of urban life and its promises of progress for the future.
Assimilating European Modernism
As the century turned, American artists increasingly sought to express an American artistic identity. They developed multiple approaches, shifting to urban and industrial imagery, broadening the definition of landscapes, and responding to the quickening infusion of artistic styles abroad. Childe Hassam's and Maurice Prendergast's departures from French Impressionism, and Marguerite Zorach's expressive Fauvist reflections, Manierre Dawson's nod to Picasso and the Paris Cubists–each of these innovations articulated America's conflicted desire to separate from the European influence while still drawing heavily from the European sources of inspiration. Nineteenth century notions of art imbued with utilitarian purpose, class consciousness, and faithful representation gave way to a profusion of artistic styles that implied a widespread analysis of perception itself– the different ways in which we "see."
At the dawn of the twentieth century, painters struggled to understand the science, behavior, and visual properties of light, color, form, and space. Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Raymond Jonson, and Stuart Davis incorporated musical concepts and color theories into their work. Einstein's theory of relativity; atomic and quantum physics; Freud's and Jung's theories of the unconscious; the fourth dimension; and developments in electricity, optics, medicine, and transportation stimulated a burst of artistic inquiry into the nature of time, memory, and reality itself. Darwin's theories and the rediscovery of Eastern religions in the nineteenth century blossomed into myriad forms of spiritual thought. For the new modern thinker, nothing was certain and no single path was the correct one. Artists created multiple ways to examine this unsettling, invigorating, and pervasive new state of things.
Multiple Paths, Multiple Voices
Just as the Armory Show brought foreign art to New York by storm in 1913, World War I delivered the world's grievances and power struggles to America's door. By the 1930s, the Great Depression in the United States and the rumblings of Fascism in Europe encouraged many artists to probe questions of ethical and social concern. Important formal experiments continued to flourish, but at the same time, significant numbers of artists chose to define American art through a more narrative, realist approach.
American regionalist views by Peter Blume, Louis Lozowick, Charles Burchfield, and Jerry Bywaters focused attention on defining the American character through subjects that described a more localized picture: landmarks and idiosyncrasies of specific regions. Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller were interested in capturing an urban feeling–something along the lines of the "slice of life" introduced by documentary photography. By contrast, Philip Evergood, Jacob Lawrence, Raphael Soyer, and Ben Shahn were hard-hitting social critics. Karl Zerbe's quintessential modern vision, which presents a distorted female figure from a decentered and precarious point of view, demands re-examination and inquiry into how sexuality and identity are constructed. These, among many other themes, became new modern directions for American art, and they persisted and intensified through World War II and into the era of civil changes of the 1950s and 1960s.
At a glance, the concept of modernism seems to define an impulse toward validating change as a constant and verifiable condition of life. To accept change as a state of being is paradoxical and tricky–status quo, tradition, convention, and comfort are called into question. Artists from 1870 to 1950 understood and articulated in concrete form–through works of art–the transformed ways in which Americans perceived themselves and their world. Their art seems to conclude that modernity presents us not with static conditions requiring simple observation and description, but with dynamic and unpredictable interplay of circumstances and responses.