A little over a century ago, Modernism began to stir in Europe, starting with Henri Matisse and his compatriots, dubbed the “fauves” or wild beasts for their radical use of strident color, extreme distortions and broad brushwork. Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with its angular forms and African masklike faces, shook the art world, triggering experiments by Georges Braque and Picasso that led to Cubism.
The rise of museums and expanding commercial art markets around this time encouraged artists to experiment in artmaking †Cubism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Fauvism, Dada and Surrealism.
Among those most influenced by these avant-garde movements was a group of talented American artists determined to push ahead of conventional tastes and trends in their native land. Key to their efforts was art impresario/photographic pioneer Alfred Stieglitz, who inaugurated a series of groundbreaking Modernist exhibitions at his 291 gallery in New York. His vigorous and canny championing was critical to the success of the avant-garde in America.
This fascinating history is told through the extraordinary American avant-garde collection of Edward and Deborah Shein, an independent art dealer and a teacher of deaf children, respectively. Thanks to their rigorous focus on prominent artists and top quality examples of their works, says National Gallery of Art director Earl A. Powell III, their trove “offers a remarkably full and nuanced account of the first avant-garde in the United States.”
“American Modernism: The Shein Collection,” on view at the National Gallery through January 2, consists of 20 superb paintings, drawings and sculptures, some of which have been donated to the gallery. The exhibition is organized by gallery staff †Nancy Anderson, curator and head of American and British paintings; Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings; and Harry Cooper, curator of Modern and contemporary art.
In the catalog, Brock observes that “Looking at the history of American Modernism through [the Shein collection] lens reveals a collective determination, even when struggling with the&onsequences&f two world wars and the Great Depression, to go beyond circumscribed personal realities and explore, through the creative acts of painting and sculpture, new fields of expression.”
The show will not travel.
A leading figure in the exhibition is the great avant-garde provocateur, Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887‱968), who had a major influence on American Modernists long before he became a US citizen in 1955. Having made his name with the controversial Cubist eye-popper “Nude Descending the Stairs” at the 1913 Armory Show, and a bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool, he was treated as a celebrity during sojourns in the United States.
Duchamp’s “readymades” †found objects presented as art, including a urinal signed “R. Mutt” and a French window with blackened panes, contributed to the Dada movement of improvised, often nonsensical expressions of intuition and irrationality that led to Surrealism. His later years were largely devoted to photography and chess. Says curator Brock, it was “Duchamp, rather than Stieglitz, or for that matter Matisse or Picasso, who&⁛had] the most enduring effect on American art.”
The most architecturally minded of the American early avant-garde was Charles Sheeler (1883‱965), a Philadelphia native who spent five years in his 20s in Europe. His Precisionist style, an echo of Cubism characterized by clear tones and colors and by motifs trimmed to their basic geometric forms, was ideally suited to depicting barns, skyscrapers and industrial sites. Early on, Sheeler applied a seemingly literal but somewhat abstract style to farm buildings and Quaker fieldstone houses around Doylestown, Penn., and the sprawling Ford River Rouge factory outside Detroit.
Later, Sheeler based paintings of abandoned New England textile mills on photomontages made up of sandwiched negatives of the subject. They culminated in “Composition around White,” 1959, whose complex, overlapping images and flat planes of color make it more an abstract than realistic image.
Sheeler’s fellow Pennsylvanian (Lancaster), Charles Demuth (1883‱935), also studied in Philadelphia and spent time in Europe, where he came under the spell of Cubism. He applied that style to paint buildings and other scenes in cool, seemingly factual descriptions that were simplified to bring out their monumentality and contexts. His finest Precisionist industrial views were based on sites in his native Lancaster, but “End of the Parade, Coatesville, Pa.,” 1920, depicts a steel company complex in that nearby city. Demuth managed to make the towering smokestacks and concrete, brick and iron factories look somehow beautiful.
Perhaps the least known painter in the exhibition, Edwin Dickinson (1891‱973), was born in upstate New York, son of a Presbyterian minister, studied under William Merritt Chase and Charles W. Hawthorne, and evolved an eccentric visionary style during sojourns in Europe. Drawing on traditions of Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and El Greco, he pursued his career on Cape Cod, the site of his culminating major work, “South Wellfleet Inn,” a painting filled with characteristic mystery and illusion.
Sculptor John Storrs (1885‱956), son of a Chicago architect, studied under Laredo Taft and Charles Grafly in the United States and Auguste Rodin in Paris. He developed an architectonic style embodying the fragmented planes and structural tensions of Cubism. “Auto Towers, Industrial Forms,” made of an identical pair of painted, cast concrete pieces, 5 feet tall, echoes the stepped, setback form of contemporary skyscrapers. The double pun of its title refers to its upright image as a tower and its horizontal look as a luxury touring car.
The son of an upstate New York brick manufacturer and politician, Arthur Dove (1880‱946) pioneered in avant-garde interpretations of nature, based on his emotional responses to the world around him. After creating the first abstract work by an American, featuring Cubist-inspired natural forms, he was championed by Stieglitz.
Moving around from Long Island Sound, where he lived on a sailboat, to upstate New York farmhouses, to a tiny former Long Island post office, he persevered in painting challenging and colorful abstract views derived from trees and fields, buildings and animals. Inspired by mystical works of Russian avant-garde painter Wassily Kandinsky and his own Transcendental inclinations, Dove’s “Sunrise I” suggests links between the heavens and earth.
Dove was a good friend of Wisconsin-born, Virginia-raised Georgia O’Keeffe (1887‱986) and each inspired the other’s art. Around 1915, without benefit of a visit to Europe, O’Keeffe began to create watercolors and drawings in a spare abstract style that attracted Stieglitz’s attention. He exhibited her work, and they married in 1924.
In the 1920s, O’Keeffe began to paint large, closeup, richly sensuous flowers in strong colors, like “Dark Iris No, 2,” 1927, which attracted wide attention. After she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, her work and the mystique of her public persona made her a national icon.
The body was a major interest of Arthur B. Davies (1862‱928), a Methodist minister’s son from Utica, N.Y., best known for dreamy, pastoral landscapes populated by nude, innocent figures. After the Armory Show, which he helped organize, he briefly adopted a Cubist style, which he applied in bright colors to human forms, as in “Mountaineers,” circa 1914. The Cubist fragmentation and bright, prismatic colors give this painting †growing out of Davies’s tangled personal life †an energy and tension missing from his Edenic works.
Russian-born Max Weber (1881‱961), a tailor’s son raised in New York, was arguably the most stylistically adventurous of the early Modernists. Traveling widely in Europe, he made friends with Matisse and Picasso, and served as a link between avant-garde Paris and the New York art world. An avid, pipe-smoking, white-haired angler, Weber incorporated his own appearance and utilized Cubist/Futurist ideas in “The Fisherman,” 1919. His later work focused on Jewish themes.
The most enduring of the early Modernists, Marsden Hartley (1877‱943), was the product of a middle-class, Lewiston, Maine, family. A Stieglitz favorite, he spent much of his career in Europe, soaking up avant-garde ideas before resettling in Maine. Particularly at home in Berlin’s militaristic ambience and its homosexual subculture, he created bold, startlingly original canvases, incorporating symbols and emblems reflecting German society, aspects of German Expressionism and French Cubism. “Pre-War Pageant,” 1913, sought to capture the fervor with which Germany prepared for World War I, the “‘living essence’ of his experience” there, according to art historian Gail Scott. In his final years in Maine, Hartley painted compelling views of the rugged typography, restless coastline and resilient people of his native state.
Along with Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890‱973) developed Synchromism, a style in which color generated form, as exemplified by “Still Life Synchromy,” 1917. After stays in Europe, he settled in California, where he taught, and incorporated Japanese motifs into abstract works.
An often overlooked star among pioneering American Modernists, Alfred Maurer (1868‱932) was trained in New York and Paris, and during years in Europe combined Cubist and Cezannesque elements in complex works like “Still Life with Doily and Roll,” 1928″2. Thereafter, he created a series of elongated, large-eyed women’s heads before committing suicide.
Death during the 1918 influenza pandemic cut short the promising career of Philadelphian Morton Schamberg (1881‱918), who trained as an architect and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before absorbing avant-garde lessons in Europe. While working with Sheeler, he developed images of tools and machines as metaphors for modern life, including “Painting VI,” which depicts a roll of fabric being fed into a machine to be sewn into hosiery.
Duchamp’s compatriot in over-the-top art, Man Ray (1890‱977) was a Philadelphia-born painter, photographer and filmmaker. He created the highly abstract “Legend” in 1916 before going abroad. Thereafter, dividing his time between the United States and Europe, he dabbled in Dada and Surrealism, creating paintings and readymades, and became a portrait and fashion photographer.
The youngest painter on view, Stuart Davis (1894‱964), abandoned realism after the Armory Show, evolving an unmistakable style of flat forms, vibrant colors, words and signs, everyday objects and rhythmical structures suggestive of jazz and urban dynamics. His “Unfinished Business,” 1962, features taut, brightly colored shapes simulating paper cutouts and letters and words in a dazzling composition.
This exhibition sheds new light on the trials, tribulations and achievements of determined American Modernists who changed the course of the nation’s art. As Brock observes, “These artists’ lives came to be defined not by their often provincial roots, national origins, or in many cases difficult circumstances, but by their travels through what Bruce so aptly called the ‘many unknown countries’ of artistic invention.”
The catalog, with informative essays and commentary on each artwork, is published by the National Gallery. The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, www.nga.gov or 202-737-4215.
