Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/george-bellows-1882-1925-modern-american-life
Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann reviews the exhibition George Bellows at the Royal Academy of Art, London, on view through June 2013.
Wiedel-Kaufmann writes: "where Hogarth, Goya or Dickens proved at least as critical of the hypocrisy of the higher classes as the depravity of the lower, as we move around the exhibition we realise that Bellows’ brush was not just adept at the fleshy distortions and brutalising carnality but equally capable of genteel delicacy. Be they roamers in central park or the members of his family - the middle class scenes are invariably portrayed with a soft focus and refined elegance that is altogether absent in the downtown scenes (Men of the Docks, 1912 providing a possible exception). All this gives weight to Marianne Doezema’s judgement that it was Bellows’ ability to "combine a 'revolutionary' style with an ingratiating message" that enabled him "to chart a delicate course between resistance and accommodation”, and rather undermines the attempts to claim him as a social realist."
Link to Post:
http://www.pirihalasz.com/blog.htm?post=905904
Piri Halasz takes a close look at the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
After revisting the show in detail, Halasz concludes: "for all its conceptual flaws, [the exhibition] still offers much to see & enjoy. I can see many reasons why the show’s organizers rejected all the semi-abstract work that I miss, and why they included so many examples of experiments, however inadequate these experiments may have been purely as art. These organizers opted for breadth as opposed to depth... instead of telling the more moving & illuminating story about how so many top-notch artists at the nerve centers in Western Europe evolved from the representational to the semi-abstract and then (sometimes but not always) to the purely abstract, creating fine art all along the way."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2013/02/an-exhilarating-exhibition-of-early.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about some of the lesser known and most surprising early 20th century abstract paintings in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
Sultan highlights "work that of artists I didn't know at all, or surprising works by artists I thought I knew" including Ivan Kliun, El Lissitzky, Vasily Kandinsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Giacomo Balla, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saundersm Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Waclaw Szpakowski, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. "What was so marvelous about this show," Sultan notes, "was the sheer range of expression, the wide variety of styles coming out of the idea to leave representation behind."
Link to Post:
http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/41100173975/inventing-abstraction-of-soil-and-air
A blog post asserting a true commonality shared by the artists included in Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
The show's "biggest achievement is that it brings together the main narratives of early twentieth-century Modernism while also casting light onto lesser known artists and works. By doing so the show emphasizes the creation of art works as a result of intersecting ideas, inventions, practices and individual biographies. These artists worked to understand what possibilities abstraction in art could open. Abstraction was neither a goal nor a uniform phenomenon... Inventing Abstraction is not about arriving at a final state or drawing a conclusion. Abstraction was never meant to be finished or concluded. Abstraction (hopefully) resonates with a part of us that welcomes all suspension of ideologies and beliefs. Abstraction is a long-term project, acutely relevant and still nourishing today’s paintings - no matter if they are made of air or soil."
Link to Post:
http://www.tnr.com/article/art/111990/moma-inventing-abstraction-exhilirating-challenging-and-completely-wrong
Jed Perl reviews the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Perl writes: "As [curator Leah] Dickerman tells the story, abstract art is a prescription rather than a permission. This is a terrible mistake. She is fascinated by work by Mondrian and Malevich, where at least for a time it seems that abstraction is a way of limiting and thereby intensifying the possibilities of painting. She banishes from the exhibition Paul Klee and Joan Miró, two seminal figures whose profoundly abstract visions did not exclude 'recognizable subject matter.' What Dickerman cannot admit is that abstraction in fact released painters to approach experience in an extraordinarily wide variety of ways."
He continues: "I am left thinking about how often the will to abstraction returns us to representation of one kind or another. I am left thinking that a broader definition of abstraction—a definition that fully embraced the achievements of Miró and Klee and the later work of Kandinsky (which with its symbolic forms may strike Dickerman as insufficiently abstract)—would make it easier to see the art of the twentieth century as a whole. And I am left thinking that a more honest and inclusive view of early modernism would render irrelevant all the talk of postmodernism, because so many of the values we tend to associate with postmodernism—narrative, symbolism, heterogeneity—are in fact aspects of early modernism."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/inventing-abstraction-absences-dawson/
Tyler Green argues that Manierre Dawson was the first american abstract painter, and thus Dawson's work is a glaring omission from the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013.
Green reports that Dawson "started painted abstractions in 1910, just after he’d joined the Chicago architecture firm Holabird and Roche. At the time, Dawson seems not to have had any awareness of the European or the fledgling American avant-garde, excepting possibly a familiarity with Cezanne. That summer he left for a year-long grand tour of Europe and found himself more interested in art than in architecture. He soon left Holabird and Roche to devote most of his time to painting and to running a Michigan fruit farm. After being fairly prolific in the 1910s, Dawson produced relatively little in the 1920s, almost nothing in the 1930s, only to spend the 1940s and 1950s exploring reliefs and sculptures. Dawson’s is far from the typical modernist story."
Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/arts/design/american-legends-calder-to-okeeffe-at-whitney-museum.html
Roberta Smith reviews the exhibition American Legends: Calder to O’Keeffe at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view through May 2013.
Smith writes: "By chance 'Legends' coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s sweeping survey 'Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925,' which traces the development of a largely geometric form of abstraction, mostly by European and Russian artists who often worked in closely related styles. In comparison the Whitney’s display might almost have been subtitled 'Inventing American Modernism, One Sensibility at a Time.' The artists here impress you as talented loners working toward diverse and much messier notions of modernity. To be sure, they take tips from European styles, but they also free themselves from such influences with highly personal responses to the sights and subjects specific to this country — the rawness of its landscapes, the tawdriness of its cities, as well as its folk art, social mores and racism. Sometimes they are working toward abstraction, sometimes not."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/07/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-barbara-kruger/
In the second segment of his weekly podcast, Tyler Green talks with curator Karen Wilkin about the exhibition American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927–1942, on view at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas through August 19, 2012. (Note: the first segment is an interview with artist Barbara Kruger, Wilkin's interview begins 40:25 into the program)
Wilkin notes the importance of John Graham to the American painters: "Graham was always in the middle of it… He's the glue." She also comments on how each artist was important to the others' development: "That kind of cross-fertilization is what fascinates us… It's not just that they're looking at European modernism, that's how these artists are always discussed, in relation to what was going on in Paris. Of course they're paying attention to that, but they're also looking at each other's interpretations of European modernism and learning from each other."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.yankeemagazine.com/art-reviews/hartley-in-dogtown/
Ed Beem blogs about the exhibition Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts, on view through October 14, 2012.
Beem writes: "Regarded as the province of vagabonds, prostitutes, witches and feral dogs, Dogtown is just the sort of place that fires the artist's imagination... Hartley's interpretation of Dogtown runs toward the Expressionist take on regionalism that defined his later work, the heaviness of both the Expressionist style and palette and of the Dogtown erratics worked out in bold, black outline. His drawings sketch the scruffy contours of the twisted and torqued landscape with particular attention to local landmarks such as the Whale's Jaw, a split pair of boulders that resemble the maw of a leviathan."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/06/schwabsky-coins-term-retromodernism-for.html
Sharon Butler questions Barry Schwabsky's coining of the term retromodernism to describe small scale paintings that mix abstraction and representation "in a manner that evokes the spiritual and intellectual strivings of classic modernism," citing examples from the Frieze Art Fair.
Butler comments that "postwar-era abstract easel painting has been a touchstone among painters... for several years, not just at the recent version of Frieze. Rather than observing a new trend, Schwabsky is giving what is already a robust movement, and therefore self-evident, a new, somewhat derogatory, name. Indeed, many painters have appropriated the visual language of Modernist painting, but from a critical stance, not as a form of nostalgia."
