What amounts to an art rebellion? If you can go back to a key moment, a kind of rebellion sometimes occurs when an artist makes an extraordinary, radical move.
Imagine watching Jackson Pollock when he “broke the ice,” as his contemporary, Willem DeKooning, put it. Pollock broke most of the rules of painting, pacing panther-like around huge canvases stretched out on the floor. His paint dripped, swirled and splattered—and blew the concept of depiction to smithereens.
“Modernism is about rebels who look at convention, and say, ‘I’m gonna stand that on its head,’” says Milwaukee Art Museum Chief Curator Brady Roberts.
That’s a key aspect of the excitement and resonance of “Van Gogh to Pollock: Modern Rebels.” The exhibit of major works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., opens June 18 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Pollock’s engulfing Convergence (1952) will show how differently art could express and, even more radically, do. Action painting will also be represented by DeKooning’s tension-filled Gotham News (1955), among others. They’re two prime “rebel” examples from Albright-Knox, which has “the best collection of abstract expressionism in the world,” says Roberts. Abstract expressionism, the mid-20th-century movement that made New York the art world capital, will be offered in its “historical context—post-impressionism, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, surrealism, Joan Miro and more,” Roberts adds.
Not all art rebels are “irascibles” as the action painters were once called. The show will include Miro’s thickly populated Carnival of Harlequin (1925), a major statement of surrealist sensibility at its most playful. Also, there’s Henri Matisse’s gorgeously idiosyncratic sense of line and color in La Musique (1910), depicting two seated women, one playing a guitar.
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And yet, you have the anguished genius, Vincent Van Gogh, on the front end of the show’s historical spectrum. Before him, artists rarely attacked the canvas with such raw gusto or expressive directness, so the emotion in the brush gestures communicated as much as the depiction of the scene, as in The Old Mill (1888). “Modernism is also the invention of style as personal expression,” Roberts says.
Modernism’s roots rose from 19th-century Romanticism, Roberts notes, but it’s also a response to the Industrial Revolution. An explicit example referencing that revolution in the show will be Robert DeLaunay’s Sun, Tower, Airplane (1913), a cubist evocation of the Eiffel Tower, a Ferris wheel and an airplane, “three modern inventions that defied gravity,” Roberts explains.
“So, in 1913, there’s a sense of a sort of utopian future, and that artists are leading the way,” he continues. “Kandinsky, who’s also in the show, was writing about this, saying the best artists, like Picasso, were seers and prophets who understand that the world was going to change, and it’s going to be this glorious new thing. Of course, World War I happened, and that ended the utopian euphoria for industrial vanity.”
Nevertheless, modern artists continued as seers and rebels, even against the recent standard of rebellion, as 1960s pop art rejected abstract expressionism.
Among the still-underappreciated great modernists in the show is the Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a key link from surrealism to abstract expressionism. Visitors will see Gorky’s arguably greatest work, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944), “a big, luscious, beautiful painting,” Roberts says.
Roberts also sees striking parallels between the Albright-Knox and MAM—including visionary collectors. The core of Milwaukee’s permanent holdings is the Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley Collection. In the early part of the 20th century, Albright-Knox had a trustee named Conger Goodyear who sensed Modernism’s growing dynamism and started bullishly collecting. He began by acquiring a “classical” blue-period Picasso, La Toilette (1906). The painting faced controversy upfront from conservative board members for displaying a female nude so forthrightly. Later, the generous donor Seymour Knox would crucially help the gallery gain its world-class modernist heft.
Also, like MAM, the Buffalo facility is presently building a major addition to house and present its expanding collection. The construction shutdown of the Buffalo galleries is why their collection is touring, according to Roberts.
The show will also include major works by Marc Chagall, Paul Gauguin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frieda Kahlo, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Salvador Dali, Richard Deibenkorn, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Alberto Giacometti and others.
“Van Gogh to Pollock: Modern Rebels” runs through Sept. 20. For tickets and information, visit mam.org.
