History Lesson in Abstraction, Cutting Across the Americas

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For something a little lighter than usual:

History Lesson in Abstraction, Cutting Across the Americas

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: February 18, 2010

NEWARK — Art museums are in the business of sorting out history. And it often falls to our smaller institutions to tackle the initial, broad-stroke cuts. Over the years the Newark Museum has taken on this path-clearing role with relish, particularly when the histories are transcultural in scope. It does so again in “Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s,” the capstone exhibition of the museum’s centennial.

John Ferren's “Paris Abstract,” from around 1935, is among the works from North and South American modernist artists in a show at the Newark Museum. More Photos >

In this case, a chunk of the history is in Newark’s collection. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the museum assiduously bought, sometimes straight from artists’ studios, a type of American painting and sculpture known as geometric abstraction. It’s attractive stuff: intimate in scale and coolly design-savvy, but shot through with political and personal content.

For all its virtues, such art never found a wide audience. Dismissed as decorative and un-American in the isolationist 1930s, it was all but submerged in the flood tide of Abstract Expressionism. Newark was left with superlative holdings in an art no one knew or cared much about.

Appreciation has grown since and is bound to increase with this show. The inclusion of household names — Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Ad Reinhardt — will help. But it’s the presence of sparkling, less-noticed contemporaries like John Ferren, Raymond Jonson, Alice Trumbull Mason, John McLaughlin, George L. K. Morris and Charmion von Wiegand that turns a history lesson into an event, one that simultaneously broadens and sharpens the profile of American modernism.

That profile grows broader still, immeasurably so, with the show’s inclusion of paintings and sculptures, all borrowed from other collections, by artists who were exploring similar abstract modes in South America during the same period. Several of them, and even a few specific works, were in “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 2007.

But it’s the equitable mixing of art from North and South America, and the influential exchanges such mixing implies, that makes the Newark show especially exciting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/arts/design/19constructive.html