This fall three New York museum exhibitions promise to deliver more than just incremental doses of change.
Each in its own way will expand a portion of the so-called master narrative of 20th-century art beyond the usual historical boundaries and great white (male) hunters of artistic glory.
On Tuesday, we offered a brief Paris sampler.
Today ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors provides a quick jaunt through the "Big Apple".
Guggenheim
The most extreme case is "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936," which opens Oct. 1 at the Guggenheim Museum.
Organized by Kenneth E. Silver, an art historian at New York University working with Helen Hsu, a curator at the Guggenheim, the exhibition will concentrate on a current that mainstream art history mostly forgot: the Classical and realist figurative styles that flourished in Western Europe during the fractured, fractious inner-war period and sometimes became associated with Nazism and fascism.
During these years many artists responded to the devastation of World War I by forsaking experimentation for more traditional aesthetic values. France's "retour à l'ordre"(return to order), Italyís "ritorno al mestiere" (return to craft) and Germanyís "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity) have heretofore been considered in terms of a few famous formerly avant-garde exemplars like Picasso, Braque, LÈger, de Chirico and Otto Dix.
But, with 80 artists, "Chaos and Classicism" will be abundant with relative unknowns like the French painter Suzanne Phocas, the German realist Adolf Ziegler and the Italian sculptor Arturo Martini. The showís range of mediums will pit painting and sculpture against fashion photography and posters, Bauhaus against Art Deco, Mediterranean idylls against northern morality tales.
There will be ephemera like the distinctive black circular eyeglass frames that were part of Le Corbusierís signature look, and surprises like de Chirico's "Gladiators at Rest" (1928-29, shown top right), a little-known painting of toga-wearing youths commissioned by the French dealer Léonce Rosenberg.
This work inaugurates the show's eighth and final section, "The Darker Side of Classicism," which will also feature a poster for the 1936 Berlin Olympics designed by Franz Wurbel and the prologue from Leni Riefenstahlís Nazi propaganda film "Olympia." The exhibition might well have been titled "Chaos and Classicism and More Chaos."
MOMA
If the Guggenheim show expands upon an outré artistic phenomenon, the Museum of Modern Art broadens one of American artís great genesis myths with "Abstract Expressionist New York," which opens Oct. 3.
The show's intention is to move beyond the short list of artists -- barely a baker's dozen -- generally associated with what is often called the triumph of American painting.
Instead, this show will represent around 65 artists with some 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper, all from the Modernís holdings, except for three or four promised gifts.
"The Big Picture" has been organized by Ann Temkin, the chief curator of the Modernís vaunted department of painting and sculpture. It may be the largest exhibition ever devoted to Abstract Expressionism.
It is the most extensive in terms of works and mediums to be held at the museum, and easily 40 or 50 years overdue, given that in the mid-1960s MoMA began mounting ambitious surveys of emerging trends like Op, Minimal and Conceptual Art. Spanning 1938 to 1968, "The Big Picture" will fill the museumís entire fourth floor, reserved for postwar works from the permanent collection, as well as its galleries for prints and for drawings on the second and third floors.
It should be a movable feast of re-evaluation.
Works by supposedly second-string and/or second-generation Abstract Expressionists like Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell (shown here), Grace Hartigan and Norman Lewis will be included, as will those by long-overlooked artists like Landés Lewitin, Dorothy Dehner and Charles Seliger (who died only last year, painting to the end).
The very boundaries of the style will be stretched by the inclusion of Romare Bearden and the architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller.
The show also offers a chance to assess the Modern's prescience, speed and imagination where collecting Abstract Expressionism is concerned. Its involvement could be said to start with Jackson Pollock's glowering "She-Wolf," which was painted in 1943 (upper left) and acquired by the museum in 1944.
Brooklyn Museum
Given that freshness of information is often a measure of impact, the smallest of these three shows may prove to break the most ground. This is "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968," which opens at the Brooklyn Museum on Oct. 15.
Organized last year by the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and supplemented with a few works from the Brooklyn collection, this exhibition could split open an art movement that was smaller and more closed to women than Abstract Expressionism.
It will present of more than 80 works by 25 women hailing from the United States and eight other countries.
In one way or another, all use objects from popular culture in their work. Some -- like the sculptors Escobar, Chryssa and Niki de Saint Phalle (shown right), the painter-sculptor artist Yayoi Kusama and the painters Vija Celmins and Rosalyn Drexler -- have long been tangentially associated with Pop Art.
Others -- like the painters Pauline Boty, Evelyne Axell and Dorothy Grebenak and the sculptor Jann Haworth -- are barely known.
Pop Art, American style, has always been especially narrow, even where male artists are concerned, as proven by the exclusion of John Wesley, Alex Katz and Larry Rivers from its ranks. The prospect of 25 new female candidates for its pantheon is little short of thrilling.
courtesy, NY Times
