Nothing can quite compare to an all-afternoon ramble through a great showplace like New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Yet the just-opened High Museum of Art exhibition “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters” offers some advantages over a visit to the Manhattan mothership beyond the airfare savings.
The High is billing the 129-work exhibit as one of the largest concentrations of modern art masterpieces ever to be exhibited in the Southeast. And while the masterwork-studded survey show is a sliver of MoMA’s deep permanent collection, concentrating the experience into an exhibit that can be viewed on one Wieland Pavilion floor emphasizes the connections between some of the 20th century’s most potent art-makers.
“While many of these iconic works are on view often at MoMA, they perhaps never have been organized in this way,” High curator of modern and contemporary art Michael Rooks said. He noted that MoMA show curator Jodi Hauptman and her New York colleagues have been struck by “the kinds of formal parallels, and rhymes and influences and responses that happen between and among the artists.”
One prime example he cites: the way Joan Miró’s organic shapes influenced Jackson Pollock, whose almost random way of painting is mirrored in Jasper Johns’ 1930 “Map,” an extremely loose rendering of the continental United States. A museum visitor can stand in one place in the gallery and feel the vibrations of inspiration radiating among the trio, Rooks said.
Galleries dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol bookend “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters.” In between, works are showcased by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois and Jasper Johns. (Johns is the exhibit’s last living artist and one of two Southern-born ones; Bearden is the other.)
The AJC asked Rooks to share his insights into four of the masterworks.
Andy Warhol: "Campbell's Soup Cans"
“It’s an amazing painting and has a great monumentality when you walk into the gallery,” Rooks said. “I think a lot of people are surprised by the size of each individual painting [20 inches by 16 inches each]. Together, they form this kind of frieze in a way.”
When the 32 paintings, representing every flavor in the Campbell’s line, were first shown in 1962 at a Los Angeles gallery, they were lined on shelves, as if on display in a grocery. The artist’s idea was “to underscore the sense of ordinariness,” the curator said.
Nearly half a century later, it’s hard to know how much the work was intended as homage and how far Warhol’s tongue was planted in cheek.
“It’s such a common consumer product ... that we don’t think of it in terms of the monumental and heroic,” Rooks said. It’s more a celebration of “the ordinary, not the extraordinary,” the curator added.
Yet Warhol, who grew up in lower-middle-class Pittsburgh, quite appreciated Campbell’s. “I used to drink it,” he once recalled of the canned soup. “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years I guess, the same thing over and over again.”
Still, it’s doubtless that Warhol was tweaking consumerism and, by repeating the same basic banal image at the same scale, riffing on the manipulations of advertising.
Warhol became known as such a master of the silkscreen process and other forms of reproduction, that Rooks believes many will be surprised that each canvas in “Campbell’s Soup Cans” is an original, completed with the help of studio assistants, and not a print.
“They look like they were made using mechanical reproduction, and that’s pop,” said Rooks, noting that Warhol soon thereafter moved to multiples. “They are subtle differences in each painting, which are kind of fun to find.”
Henri Matisse: "Dance (I)"
Rooks views this early 20th century masterpiece and hears an equally classic piece of music in his mind.
“It’s a life-affirming kind of painting,” the curator said. “I always think of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring,’ because it has this Utopian feeling about it.”
In 1908, the year before he produced this epic (8 feet 6 inches by 12 feet 9 inches), Matisse said, “Suppose I want to paint a woman’s body. First of all, I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image, which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human.”
Matisse’s reduction of the dance circle to simple forms rendered with minimal perspective and flat planes of paint, seen by some as crude at the time, indeed adds up to a heady encapsulation of joy, movement and energy.
The dancers, who could be viewed more as mythic beauties than actual performers, are set against flat expanses of purple-blue and green (suggesting sky and earth, though perhaps one without gravity).
The figure at left, shown in graceful stride forward while reaching back for the hand of the dancer to her right, seems to be setting the circle’s fluid motion.
“One of the wonderful things about it is the sort of serpentine curve where the arms are connected,” Rooks said.
The curator connects that feeling to the dawning of a new century, the birth of the modern era that holds the promise of innovation and an improved quality of life.
“There was a sense of utopia that was crushed shortly thereafter [by the onset of World War I],” he said, “but it’s wonderful to see in this painting.”
Pablo Picasso: "Girl Before a Mirror"
The 1932 oil on canvas that greets visitors to “Picasso to Warhol” is also one of the exhibit’s most complex, true to the singularly talented Spanish artist who was a master of so many 20th century art movements.
It’s a portrait of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, a favorite subject in the early 1930s.
The 6-foot-4-inch by 4-feet-3-inch painting is divided down the center, each half packed with content. “On the left, you have the world of living,” Rooks noted. “On the right, a kind of netherworld, a sort of reflection of the figure’s interior. Her symbolic interior, metaphoric interior, psychological interior.”
Some art historians have read the haloed profile on the left side (that merges with a yellow, made-up face) as a suggestion of Walter’s transition from innocent girl to sexually aware woman.
The gray-faced, hollow-eyed reflection on the composition’s left side may speak to a more challenging future or even mortality.
The figure on the left side extends a long arm across the center line to embrace her reflection, as if, it has been interpreted, to unite her two selves.
On both sides, Rooks observed, Walter’s extended belly is apparent, foreshadowing the daughter she produced three years later with the artist, Maya.
The diamond-shaped wallpaper in the colors of Spain evokes the costume of the harlequin, a comic character Picasso often visually referenced as an alter ego.
“So he inserts himself into the private chamber of his mistress in a way that’s sneaky and but also assertive,” the curator said.
To Rooks, this fits with Picasso’s repeated representation of himself as a “sort of hero-conqueror,” and his frequent depictions of women “as wives, lovers, companions who are fecund and filling the roles of mothers or future mothers.”
Jackson Pollock: "Number 1A"
The New York artist produced this monumental (5 feet 8 inches by 8 feet 8 inches) 1948 canvas early in his “drip painting” period, where Pollock forgoes the easel or the wall to create his compositions on the floor. Rooks described his art-making process as highly physical, almost a dance around the canvas.
Almost to emphasize the physicality, Pollock pressed several hand prints into the composition’s upper right corner.
Around this time Pollock stopped giving the viewer hints about the meaning of paintings via his titles and began instead to number them. “Numbers are neutral,” his wife, artist Lee Krasner, once explained. “They make people look at a painting for what it is — pure painting.”
Not everyone got Pollock’s new approach. When first exhibited in 1949, this now-famed piece did not sell.
Rooks appreciates it because Pollock amassed skeins of paint around the canvas without allowing the material to go off the edge. The raw, unpainted canvas around the perimeter of the composition lends the painting “a sense of volume, mass and weight,” Rooks said.
Inside this defined pictorial space, Rooks believes literal meaning can be found — landscapes of the mind. “If you use your imagination, you can start to see forms in it, like you would be looking at clouds basically. “Your imagination can work with a sense of space in that way.”
“Earlier and later in his career, he would include images that were symbolic that had to do with Jungian archetypes,” the curator added. “It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could maybe search for these kinds of images embedded in these abstract skeins of paint.”
On view
"Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters"
Through April 29, 2012; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $18; $15, students and seniors; $11, ages 6-17; free, children 5 and younger and members. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
As part of its four-year partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, the High is launching a film series drawn from MoMA's archives, "Modern Masters of Film: From Edison to Scorsese," including the Andy Warhol-directed "The Chelsea Girls" at 2 and 8 p.m. Nov. 5. Full details: www.high.org.
Other "Picasso to Warhol" programming includes a young-adult Culture Shock party, Modern Masquerade,cq, featuring dance music by the New York band Pablo Picasso and DJ Kathleen Hanna. 8 p.m. Oct. 29. Information: www.high.org (click Programs). For more "Picasso to Warhol" programming, go to www.high.org/en/Art/Exhibitions/Picasso-to-Warhol.aspx (click Related Events).
