Spaightwood Galleries

"Masters of Modernity"

179 works by Picasso (30), Matisse (33), Chagall (52), Kandinsky (10), and Miró (41), plus works by Braque (2), Klee, Léger (6), and Giacometti (6) (click the links for our home pages for each artist)

For selections from the show, see: The Figure / Artist and Model / Nature / Nature2 / People / People2 / People3
Music and Dance / Biblical etchings / Chagall's Lithographs for the Bible / Chagall and Paris / Kandinsky

October 27 2007 to February 3 2008

Just as the Renaissance consciously rejected their immediate predecessors and proclaimed themselves to be a "new birth" of artistic spirit and vision, a return to a lost ideal of perfection, so, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of artists consciously rejected their immediate predecessors and proclaimed that the "old" art was over and that a new age demanded a new art, an art that broke decisively with the past to create a new age of artistic spirit and vision, an art appropriate to the new world being born from the ashes of the old. Where the Impressionists had claimed to bring a new scientific perception of reality, Picasso and Braque's experiments remade "reality" by simultaneously showing objects in three dimensions and from simultaneous planes of perception. Where the German Expressionists wanted to color reality with their feelings about it, Matisse and the Fauves wanted to remake reality by showing its artificiality by using color to abstract objects and people from their social and natural settings and put them in an artificial space created by art.

Kandinsky took this impulse in a different direction by transforming objects into abstractions that used color and rhythm to remake both the artists who made them and the viewer who saw and surrendered to them as a way of remaking him or herself. According to Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944: The journey to abstraction (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), "Kandinsky regularly acknowledged that he was unable to fully renounce the object in his pictures before 1914. As he explained, however, the objects he depicted arose in him out of pure emotion; they formed themselves in his imagination out of color and line and should therefore be understood by the viewer as abstract" (p. 56). Chagall, like Kandinsky a voluntary exile from a collapsing social order, offered viewers a world liberated from reality by the power of the imagination. Miró, whom Picasso acclaimed as the only painter to take art further than where Picasso had taken it, created imaginary spaces for discovery of inner truths and truths about the world outside the self, offering the possibility for recreating the universe of the self by liberating itself from itself and proclaiming its essential participation with the oneness of (sur)reality. Perhaps Barbara Rose best explains Miró’s importance when she notes, "Miró’s contribution to current painting is inestimable," and adds: "surrealist space, at least as it was developed by Miró, is open, expansive, indeterminate, as opposed to the closed, finite restrictive space of cubism, with its layered planes and silhouetted shapes. Surrealist space is as fluid as the thought process involved in the technique of free association that inspired surrealist automatism. Certainly it is no accident that the discovery of the unconscious, as well as man’s initial experiences in exploring atmospheric outer space, coincided with the conceptualization of a new kind of pictorial space that is both continuous and unbounded."

Giacometti, on the other hand, presents a world in which people and objects seem alienated from each other and themselves while Leger tried to adopt the rhythms of the of the machine into a way of living in a mechanical age.

As we hung the show we were struck by the different "modernities" presented by the works on the walls around us. What links these modern masters is, in fact,  their quest for the idea of the "Modern" rather than for a particular end.  Modernity, it appears, is not a monolithic concept but a quest, a journey toward an end which for the artists in this show was found in their different, individual visions. See below for a sampler of works from the show.