Reynolda show unites masters of mid-century Masters

If you haven’t yet seen Reynolda House’s exhibition “Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” add it to your holiday to-do list.

It’s the most important art show in the Triad this year, one that merits sustained looking and reveals a lot about the way art has developed in the past several decades.

The exhibition is largely made up of works by some of the most iconic names in American art during the mid-20th century, roughly from World War II to the post-Vietnam era. It gives an abbreviated overview of the art that baby boomers grew up with.

Among the show’s 43 works are some great paintings and a few powerful sculptures. Chronologically, the selection begins with classic examples of abstract expressionism, the loosely defined, prevailing art style in this country from the late 1940s through the ’50s.

Hans Hofmann, a pioneer abstract-expressionist, made the show’s earliest piece — “Afterglow,” a small oil painting — in 1938. With its bursts of gestural marks in colors that evoke flowering plants in springtime, it makes for a concise visual lesson in the relationship between post-impressionism and “action painting,” as such gestural, largely nonpictorial art was sometimes called.

Of particular interest among the show’s selection of abstract-expressionist work are the three paintings by Franz Kline. Dominating this section of the show is the largest of them, an untitled, 5-foot-wide and 7-foot-high canvas painted in 1961. With its slashing black lines and marks on a white ground, it’s a classic Kline, suggestive of enlarged, spontaneous calligraphy or loosely sketched, interconnecting architectural forms.

The other two Klines, from about the same period, convey something of the same highly energized impression despite being significantly smaller. Departing from his widely known black-and-white paintings, Kline employed bold colors in these smaller paintings. The particularly striking one in predominant shades of blue carries the memorably poetic title “Blueberry Eyes.”

The works by Hofmann and Kline are among those grouped in a section of the show titled “Significant Gestures.” Other highlights here include large, visually compelling canvases by Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, as well as three works by Robert Motherwell made up of more sharply defined abstract shapes and forms. Also in this part of this show is Theodore Roszak’s cast-bronze sculpture “Thistle in the Dream,” an intricate, organically referenced form that seems to prefigure the work of H.R. Giger, a Swiss surrealist.

Geometric abstraction, color-field painting and minimalism are the focal points for the show’s “Optics and Order” section. The key figure is Josef Albers, whose precise experiments with color and mathematical proportion inspired many American artists during the mid-20th century.

Albers taught at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College from 1932 to 1949, after which his influence became more widespread as an art professor at Yale University. He’s represented by two paintings whose right-angled shapes and contrasting colors tend to play tricks on your eye.

Also of special interest in this section are two paintings by Ilya Bolotowsky, who taught with Albers at Black Mountain; a big, seemingly all-black canvas by Ad Reinhardt; and sculptures by Louise Nevelson and Anne Truitt that are also predominantly or entirely black.

The conspicuous re-emergence of the figure in American art during and after the 1960s is the main subject of the show’s concluding section, “New Images of Man,” from an important group show in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art. Included are two small, figure-based collages from the early 1960s by Romare Bearden, a Charlotte native, in both cases inspired by aspects of black culture. Stylistically and thematically related to those two works is a larger collage from 1974 by David Driskell.

Among the largest contributions to this section are an autobiographical, multifigure painting by Larry Rivers (“The Athlete’s Dream,” from 1956) and Grace Hartigan’s 1967 canvas “Modern Cycle,” crammed with abstract human and motorcycle body parts. My favorite pieces are two dark, expressionistic portraits from 1961 by Nathan Oliveira, one of the few West Coast artists represented in the show.

“Modern Masters” includes several works by lesser-known artists such as Seymour Lipton, John McLaughlin and Paul Wonner.

Conspicuous in their absence are mid-20th century art giants including Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Although it’s hardly a comprehensive selection, the exhibition represents a significant cross-section of American art during a tumultuous, transitional period. And it’s an opportunity to see some stunning, major works that rarely leave the nation’s capital.

MASTERS

If you go

Who: 31 artists of the mid-20th century

What: “Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum”

Where: Reynolda House, 2250 Reynolda Road

When: Closing on Dec. 31

Information: (336) 758-5150