Two new exhibitions of more than usual interest have as their focus the relationship between urban life in the early 20th Century and the burgeoning of modern art.
One of the shows, ”Of Time and the City” (at the Terra Museum of American Art), examines how modern ideas that were European in origin changed when they came to New York.
The other exhibition, ”Thinking Modern: Painting in Chicago 1910-1940”
(at Northwestern University`s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery), traces the impact of such ideas on the local scene, exploring regional alternatives and variations.
The Terra show is half the size of the Block`s-48 as compared with 82 pieces-but includes paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, collages and drawings. It also has a thesis that gives a different view of the motivations of famous figures, whereas the Block exhibition is more about introducing long-forgotten artists and establishing a context for their achievements.
The thesis that curator Daphne Anderson Deeds proposes is fresh and high in interest. It acknowledges modernism as a European invention that arose from conditions not shared by Americans. Simply put, the conditions had everything to do with a different experience of time.
”European time is slower, more deliberate and patient,” writes Deeds.
”It is born of a pastoral history, wherein feudal systems often still prevailed early in this century; the European urban setting proceeded from ancient Roman city states, which were destroyed and rebuilt through the centuries prior to modernity.
”But time in America has always been fast because it is new time,”
Deeds continues. ”The relatively brief period of European inhabitance of this continent has created a telescopic sense of time, one that began with the optimism of the colonial period and culminated in the urgent pace of New York City at the turn of the century.”
That pace made New York especially receptive to new ideas. But the crux of Deeds` argument involves the singular mixture of idealism and practicality that, in effect, built Manhattan and many another American city. Deeds finds it is a mixture that crossed Ralph Waldo Emerson with William James to give an impulse deeply, unmistakably American.
Orthodox histories take a formal approach to the art of the period, showing just how much Americans were indebted to Europeans. Deeds, however, goes beyond the look of the works, to demonstrate how American artists embraced-and thereby transformed-modernism for their own reasons.
One of the most striking examples is a 1915 Cubist painting by Max Weber. It has both the facets and grey-brown tonalities of Picasso and Braque`s analytical cubism, but it does not depict concrete objects. Weber called the painting ”Night.” So he has adapted the language of Cubism to a subject that is not at all material, and Deeds convincingly links the effort to American transcendentalism.
Again and again, we learn that familiar artists such as Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Marsden Hartley and Joseph Stella did not mimic European styles as much as adapt them to American experience. And in this way, they often gave modern styles a new robustness, even a rawness.
The exhibition does not press the case as strongly as does Deed`s catalogue essay, for several pieces on view by Hartley, Stuart Davis, Georgia O`Keeffe and others do not advance modernist thought in the least. However, some of the works-by George Ault, Andrew Dasburg, Edwin Dickinson and Augustus William Tack-are among the most beautiful in the exhibition, so here is one of those happy instances when the mind and eye both receive nourishment in about equal measure.
All of the pieces come from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; few museums in America have better collections of such material. So anyone interested in modern American art will have to see the exhibition and ponder Deeds` conclusions. They have a rightness that makes one regret the show was not larger.
”Thinking Modern” covers the same period from a local angle-which makes a considerable difference. Chicagoans reacted less positively to the latest currents from Europe, though the famous 1913 Armory Show came here and gave artists the same advantage enjoyed by colleagues in New York.
The point the exhibition makes rather too frequently is that Chicago painters were ”thinking modern” despite the conservative look of their work. This means, in the interest of local history, viewers should be prepared to honor artistic intentions more than results.
Some years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a small but engrossing exhibition for Manierre Dawson, a distinguished Chicago modern. His work is also on view in the present show, but its achievement looks less significant, having been surrounded by so much that is second-rate.
Dawson is an artist who, like the Lithuanian Mikolojus Ciurlonis and the Czech Frantisek Kupka, has some claim to creating the first non-objective painting. In any case, for a moment in 1910, his canvases were as daring as any in the world. But, soon enough, he retreated into a figurative style derived from Paul Cezanne and, for all practical purposes, was lost.
Dawson, John Storrs and, later, Rudolph Weisenborn were Chicago`s most important abstract artists, but Storrs was more an architect and a sculptor, and we see him only to slight advantage in ”Of Time and the City.”
Weisenborn was an ideologue who tirelessly championed modern art, but his fight for the cause was more influential than his paintings on view, which are ambitious but clearly the work of a follower.
Paul Kelpe was apparently the only other abstract painter of note, creating Le Corbusier-like images he elaborated with wood and metal additions. These look strongly derivative but at least they are modern, which is more than one can say about the majority of works on show.
Deeds` premise that ”modernism disparages references to history or the anecdotal” has played no part in ”Thinking Modern.” Nearly everything proclaims its antecedents, and storytelling abounds. Sometimes, as in Carl Hoeckner`s ”The Homecoming,” we are thrust back to the Symbolist world of Jan Toorop. Elsewhere, as in ”Snow Birds” by Anthony Angarola, it is Picasso`s absinthe-soaked Blue period. And an entire section of the show titled ”The Art of Social Concern” clearly comes out of the seedy realism of the Ash Can School.
When, finally, in the `30s, we get to American Scene painting, little is different. There was no rejection of modernist values or retreat to a more conservative figurative style. Most of the Chicago painters, with the exception of Ivan Albright, had worked conservatively all along.
Perhaps the best section is devoted to images of the city itself, for it is virtually a survey of all of the show`s approaches and styles. The lyrical Precisionism of Raymond Jonson stops just short of sweetness and is one of the show`s especially interesting finds. A comparison of his cityscapes and, say, O`Keeffe`s would not always have the more famous artist coming out ahead.
This is a show, then, that gives surprise in direct proportion to how little one expects. Much of the work has only the appeal of travel studies viewed through a nostalgic lens. But there are some worthy exceptions and, without question, much can be learned about the art scene today by examining Chicago`s past.
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”Of Time and the City” continues at the Terra Museum of American Art, 666 N. Michigan Ave., through March 22. ”Thinking Modern: Painting in Chicago 1910-1940” continues at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, through April 5.
