No matter whether you are a newbie to modern art or a devotee, you can't go wrong with the High Museum's “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters.”
Drawn from the stellar collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the exhibit maps the unfolding of modernism through 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints and films by some of its key practitioners.
Art History 101 taught by Henri Matisse's “Dance,” Constantin Brancusi's “Bird in Space,” Jackson Pollock's “Number 1A, 1948,” Andy Warhol's soup cans. What's not to like?
Less familiar, and often revelatory, works such as Brancusi's photos of his studio augment textbook examples. Offering a different sort of revelation, the display of Alexander Calder's sculptures, so ubiquitous as to be clichés of themselves, brings them back to life.
“Picasso to Warhol,” part of the High's multi-year collaboration with MOMA, is a marked improvement over a previous such effort with the Louvre. The works here are of consistent quality and, unlike the strained concepts behind a number of the Louvre shows, the curation grows organically out of the art.
The show is laid out as a series of mini-solo shows, in which each artist is represented by a constellation of works that offer a sense of his evolution or an insight into his working methods.
Piet Mondrian's early pieces, for example, suggest the process of distillation by which he headed toward his non-objective paintings. Hans Namuth's landmark film documents Pollock's drip method.
But chronology is hardly the only path planted by the curatorial team, led by MOMA curators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha Friedman, with High curators David Brenneman and Michael Rooks. One such sub-theme is motion, including the pendulum swings between representation and abstraction. Exemplifying both is Fernand Léger's film “Ballet mécanique ” – an abstract compendium of machine gears, carnival rides, autos and such, which celebrates the Machine Age.
The exhibit is installed to facilitate eavesdropping on conversations among the artists. One can simultaneously see Pollock's “Number 1A” and “Map,” Jasper Johns' retort to ab-ex emotion and profundity, in which he applies a gestural style to a mundane factual object. In the next gallery, Warhol oedipally delivers the coup de grâce with his Brillo box sculptures, and Marcel Duchamp, whose ready-mades are in the soup cans' DNA, becomes the paterfamilias for the next generation.
This exhibition represents an art history. As its curators would readily acknowledge, they could have told the story in different ways with multiple sets of artists. This one follows the canon famously established by MOMA founder Alfred Barr. There is one female, Louise Bourgeois, and one African-American, Romare Bearden, in the group. It is enlightening to see how their inclusion enriches and destabilizes the linear progression.
Bearden clearly had his own conversations with past masters. You can see Cubism in the fractured forms of his collages, but instead of using the language to deconstruct form, space and time, he brings the parts together to create representational images of African-American life.
Patchwork Quilt” is his version of the reclining nude (see Matisse's “Goldfish and Sculpture”). Responding specifically to Manet's “Olympia,” he makes the black figure -- a maid who was in the background -- the protagonist and replaces the luxe surroundings with a worn quilt. It is the most politically charged work in the show.
Catherine Fox is chief art critic of http://www.ArtsCriticATL.com
REVIEW
“Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters.”
Through April 29, 2012. $18; $15, students and seniors; $11, children 6-17; free for children 5 and under and members. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesdays-Saturdays; Thursdays until 8 p.m.; noon-5 p.m., Sundays. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444. www.high.org.
The bottom line: Plenty to see and think about in this icon-studded story of modern art.
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