The contrast is striking.
On the front cover of the catalog for "Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s-1950s" -- an exhibition opening at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art on Thursday -- Asher B. Durand's Study of a Wood Interior (ca. 1855) details a quiet forest glade. Soft green lichen carpets rocks and trees, adding to the hushed, reverent atmosphere.
However, if readers follow the bumblebee stripes that creep over the spine of the book to the back cover, they will encounter Frank Stella's East Broadway (1958), a gritty, industrial abstraction of New York City's Lower East Side. The image's flatness, harsh coloration, smeary paint and repeated horizontal lines hardly invite viewers to enter the nonetheless compelling picture plane.
What a difference a century makes.
The time period examined by "Coming of Age," which spotlights a portion of the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., begins before the Civil War and ends just after World War II. The world as it appeared to artists in the mid-1800s differed dramatically from that of the mid-1900s, as concepts of time and space transformed in radical ways thanks to ever-developing technology.
"That is really what I find fascinating," says Irvin Lippman, the museum's executive director. "It's that historical view over that important 100 years and what's important to these artists. ... What are they capturing about American life during that period?"
The century also produced some of the nation's finest and most enduring artists. With those on exhibit including Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, the show, as its title implies, surveys how American painters were developing an aesthetic at once inextricably tied to and distinct from their European forebears and contemporaries.
American artists in the mid-19th century were trekking to Paris and other European art centers, taking inspiration from both classic works and new schools of painting. But, this exhibit argues, they returned home with a renewed determination to apply what they had learned to their own surroundings.
However, Lippman cautions, viewers of the show should not make too much of American artists breaking away from their Continental counterparts, who likewise were shedding tradition and coming to grips with the modern world. Rather, he says, it should be seen as an ongoing conversation between the Old World and the New.
"Far more important about this show is its extraordinary quality," Lippman says. "The Addison, over the course of decades, has amassed one of the great collections of American art. The Eakins, the Homer, the [ Edward] Hopper are all extraordinary examples of these artists' works. This is really a show of icons, where everything is an American masterpiece."
Susan C. Faxon, the Addison's associate director and curator of art before 1950, makes a compelling argument for the development of an American aesthetic. In a "Coming of Age" catalog essay, she examines the seeds of a national vision that were flowering by midcentury. Whether in the meticulous detail of Martin Johnson Heade's Apple Blossoms and Hummingbird (1871) or the impressionistic vision of John Henry Twachtman's Hemlock Pool (ca. 1900), Faxon writes, American artists were attempting to communicate something unique about the character of the country, as well as about its flora and fauna.
"Certainly, they had technique that could be seen in European painting, as well, but they were looking with pristine, fresh eyes at pristine, fresh landscapes," Faxon says. "In many of the earliest works in this collection, they are looking at the landscape through the lens of mid-19th century thought, where the landscape is the reflection of the hand of God. And I think they probably would extrapolate that this American landscape was God-given."
Inarguably influenced by European developments such as Impressionism, American artists developed a more rugged sensibility that seemed to eschew the merely decorative, even as important critics such as George Sheldon continued to hew to the belief that "the sole end of art is the expression of beauty."
Homer (1836-1910) found himself at the center of aesthetic debate with his attempts at bolder, more personal imagery. Critic and novelist Henry James called Homer's work unimaginative, "barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," even as he allowed that "there is nevertheless something one likes about him."
Homer's lengthy visits to France and England proved profound in his post-Civil War output, as seen in Eight Bells (1886) and The West Wind (1891), both of which are featured in the exhibit. In the former, a pair of rain-slickered mariners study their sextants on the deck of a ship; large and significant in the painting's center, the sailors remain calm and confident as whitecaps churn the ocean and clouds either darken the sky or are clearing from a passing storm, depending on the viewer's perspective.
"Homer was a logical progression," Faxon says, noting the relaxation of technique and an increased emphasis on painterliness and brush strokes that were happening on both sides of the Atlantic. "I've actually hung Eight Bells as the beginning point of a whole trajectory that goes through American painting into abstraction. Just look at the composition of Eight Bells; it's very reduced, the geometry is completely visible."
Homer's artistic ambition, says Lippman, reflects the nation's continued rewarding of innovation.
"Here's a time when people were finding that they could express themselves in new, inventive ways that had a profound impact on the course of creating art, the same way Thomas Edison made great headway with electricity or the Wrights made great headway by lifting a pile of wood into the air," he says. "So that was the genius of America during those 100 years."
Social reportage also creeps into American painting in the early 20th century, as artists of the Ashcan School chronicled the rapidly changing vistas of urban America. John Sloan's Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (1912) captures an intimate moment among a trio of women casually primping atop a tenement building, with wash hanging on the line and the gray, smoky skyline their backdrop.
Modernism and realism were not contradictory concepts, as artists /like Stuart Davis/ strove to get to deeper truths, even in the most abstract works. In his essay American Art, 1910-1950s: Themes, Traditions, Continuities, which appears in the catalog for the exhibit, William C. Agee explains this imperative as stemming from "the modern artist's desire to engage the viewer as directly as possible .ƒ|.ƒ|. by removing all visual or narrative elements between the artist and painting, and between the viewer and the painting."
The exacting, poured-„fpaint tangle of Pollock's Phosphorescence (1947) was as much a reaction to the natural light in the sky over Long Island as Stella's aforementioned East Broadway was an attempt to limn the steel and dirt of the Lower East Side a decade later. Although it had European antecedents, abstract Expressionism blossomed in the United States, pulling the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York City.
"Part of it is the power of the United States to be inventive," Lippman says. "So you have Pollock really creating something that is, in fact, a great breakthrough in the visual arts that was going to change how we looked at things for some decades to come."
Adds Faxon: "I think the freshness and the youngness and the aggressiveness of any of those abstract paintings certainly is as American as anything. But it's also a tremendous amount of confidence in the ability to make paintings that transcend nationality.
"That's really the story: By the time you get to the mid-20th century, these are international expressions; they're not isolated and they're not provincial. They are, in fact, leading world art."
If you go
"Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s-1950s" opens Nov. 6 at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., and runs through March 23. 954-525-5500 or www.moafl.org
source: sun sentinal
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