BWW Reviews: AMERICAN MODERN Shows the American Avant-Garde in a New Light

The modernist era was a time of overwhelming paintings, often produced by men with overwhelming egos. Picasso, Kandinsky, Marinetti, Dalì, de Kooning, Pollock-these are just a few of the artists who transformed 20th century art into a glorious welter of color and chaos. You'll find all these fervent fellows on display at the Museum of Modern Art; however, if you visit the Museum's showcase American Modern, you'll also get a welcome respite from the bombardments of the Surrealists, the Abstract Expressionists, and all their high-bombast kin. Same time period, very different energy level. Yes, there are a few painters in this exhibition (particularly American Futurist Joseph Stella) who reveled in brash effects. But more often, American Modern is a haven for calm and complex technicians such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe, and Charles Sheeler. And the layout of the exhibition-alcoves, low ceilings, a fair number of drawings, photographs, and small scene paintings-leaves no mistake that this is an intimate, meditative affair.

As its organizers have pointed out, American Modern is also a meditation on the long, complicated, easy-to-misunderstand relationship between MoMA and American art. In her informative catalog essay, drawing curator Esther Adler discusses the Museum's origins and confronts "the perception of MoMA in these years as profoundly Euro-centric." There's a grain of truth in this, since founding director Alfred H. Barr was competing with aggressively Ameri-centric institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney. Yet the larger truth, for Adler, is that MoMA "had a rich record of exhibitions of both historical, 19th-century American art and the work of many of the most celebrated American artists of the first half of the 20th century."

American Modern both underscores the MoMA's early commitments and adds to that "rich record." Offhand, it's hard to think of an important figure from the early American avant-garde (maybe Morton Schamberg, just maybe) who isn't on display. While inclusiveness like this backs up Adler's arguments, such inclusiveness also means that some of the deepest artists on display get superficial treatment. We get decent samples of Jacob Lawrence's graphics and Walker Evans's photographs, but not certainly enough to communicate the scope and power of either man's visionary social art. And Stella's two main entries-the landscape At First Light and the cityscape Factories-have little of the sweep and kineticism of his masterpiece Brooklyn Bridge paintings Yet these missteps and letdowns aren't completely surprising. There has always been something symphonic about Lawrence's, Evans's, and Stella's creations; the rest of American Modern is closer to chamber music.

The exhibition is much better to its headliners. In choosing Hopper's House by the Railroad, O'Keefe's Abstraction Blue, Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, and Stuart Davis's Lucky Strike, the organizers of American Modern have picked out some of their artists' most iconic works-most iconic, and most pared-down. As Esther Adler and Kathy Curry note in the exhibition synopsis, "the absence of the human figure is notable throughout the works in American Modern." But even a depopulated scene painting can swarm with personality. Two of the show's high points, for me at least, were Mrs. Acorn's Parlor by Hopper and Farmhouse Window and Door by O'Keefe. Already emptied of human figures, both paintings go even further and eschew expressive turns of lighting and perspective; yet by some miracle, both paintings throb with expressive life.

There are headier delights in American Modern: a big folk-artsy canvas by Florine Stettheimer, a wall of Charles Burchfield's deliriously weird landscapes. There's also a lot of less-known, less-radical American scene art that MoMA's more avant-garde visitors will probably walk right past-probably will, but probably shouldn't. Take a look, for instance, at the two George Bellows lithographs-the boxing scenes Preliminaries and Dempsey and Firpo-that made it into the showcase. At first, there can be a clunky, cut-out feeling to Bellows's figures. Yet after a few minutes, you may find yourself transfixed by the surprised, almost grotesque faces in Dempsey and Firpo, or mesmerized the female figures in Preliminaries-who stare straight out of the canvas, waiting, almost knowing that you'll be mesmerized in the end.

Photo: Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967). House by the Railroad. 1925. Oil on canvas. 24 x 29″ (61 x 73.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Digital Imaging Studio.

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