Reynolda set to show American abstract art

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is best known for elegant portraits of colonial figures and stunning depictions of nature.

The museum's permanent collection features the work of noted abstract artists such as Stuart Davis and Lee Krasner, but these are rare examples in a museum better known for figurative or representational art.

Starting Friday, a touring exhibition of modern abstraction will help enhance the museum's ability to tell the story of American art in the 20th century, particularly in the years after World War II.

"Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum" will be on display until Dec. 31. Visitors will explore "the complex and varied nature of American abstract art" through paintings and sculptures created by 31 American artists in the 1950s and early 1960s, according to media materials.

"We choose exhibitions like this to complement the holdings in our collections," said Allison Perkins, executive director of Reynolda House. "While we have some abstract expressionists, we don't have many." The artists "were so pivotal for the story of American art and how (it) achieved a breakthrough in the international art scene," she said.

"They really pushed the power of abstraction to express their moods and the thoughts of a nation in transition and the idea of a nation emerging as a powerful force."

"Modern Masters" showcases work done 50 to 60 years ago. As a result, "we can look back at the artists and have a different perspective on those cultural forces that were shaping their expression," Perkins said.

Reynolda House is the last stop on the "Modern Masters" national tour that has included stops at museums in Nashville, Tenn.; Savannah, Ga.; Greensburg, Pa.; and Dayton, Ohio.

"Modern Masters" was organized by Virginia Mecklenburg, the senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

"These artists didn't feel they could depict the visual world in a way that could powerfully express what they were thinking," she said. "It just wasn't enough. So they moved to abstraction. And they also moved big. The power … comes from their size."

Perkins and Mecklenburg pointed to World War II as a reason for the departure of American artists from the figurative in their works. Many were veterans of that conflict.

"They are dealing with a panoply of tragic circumstances that get expressed in a nonobjective form because they're hard things to deal with," Perkins said.

As for how "Modern Masters" is put together, Mecklenburg has placed each of the exhibition's 43 works into one of three thematic sections.

The first section, "Significant Gestures," explores works of such artists as Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell. These artists favored "sweeping strokes of brilliant color," media materials say.

Mecklenburg, speaking of Kline (1910-62), said he concerned himself with such elements as structure, weight and mass. She likened his "Untitled," which is featured in "Modern Masters," to a huge crane that loads coal into ships at port.

"Instead of just the visual world that you actually see out there, he's taking all these forces that make it what it is," she said. "That's what he's dealing with in his paintings. You focus on them in a way that you probably never would otherwise."

The second section, "Optics and Order," highlights the work of Josef Albers and the artists who built on his ideas. This resulted in works that favored "mathematical proportion and carefully balanced color," media materials say. The other artists in "Optics and Order" include Ilya Bolotowsky, Louise Nevelson, Esteban Vicente, Ad Reinhardt and Anne Truitt.

Albers (1888-1976), a German-born American artist and educator, taught at the now-defunct Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at Yale. He is known for his "Homage to the Square" paintings.

Albers favored "a very rigorous geometric format" and sought to understand "the way the human being perceives space and color and the way color adjusts the way space looks," Mecklenburg said. This comes through in "Insert," one of the "Homage to the Square" paintings featured in "Modern Masters."

"It takes you a minute to decide whether the central square (in "Insert") is recessive, whether it's a window at the end of a hallway or whether … it's something that's coming toward you, just because of the way he adjusts color," Mecklenburg said.

The third section in "Modern Masters" is called "New Images of Man." It includes works by Nathan Oliveira, Romare Bearden, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, David Driskell and Grace Hartigan. It recognizes that these artists "wanted to make sure that their images carried a very strong human content," Mecklenburg said. "So they started doing abstractions that had figurative elements in them."

Mecklenburg elaborated on this point by describing "Modern Cycle" by Hartigan (1922-2008). Hartigan painted it to connect with the male students she taught at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, her home from the 1960s until her death, Mecklenburg said.

"There are all sorts of (disconnected) motorcycle parts spread throughout the picture" in addition to parts of a woman's legs, Mecklenburg said. "When you see a motorcycle whipping by, you don't see the whole thing. You have an after-impression of the wheels or handlebars or whatever it is that you happened to focus on. … It's an impression of a motorcycle going by. It isn't a static picture that you'd see in a magazine."

At the end of the day, Mecklenburg would like "Modern Masters" to show "how powerful art can be to express emotions and thoughts and states of being in abstract terms."

But she allowed that "abstraction is still hard for a lot of people — not because they like or dislike the work particularly, but because they don't know how to get at it."

Perkins said visitors could rely on several entry points to better appreciate the show. One would entail not just reacting to the colors in a painting but trying to ascertain why they rub you one way or another.

Here's another entry point: Enter the show, look around and then decide which painting appeals to you enough to introduce it to a friend.

"When people walk into any museum, they bring a set of life experiences that are unique and powerful to them as individuals," Perkins said. "It is when we connect those life experiences that are ours and only ours to works of art that we begin to unlock the power of our response."