High Museum presses ‘Fast Forward’ button on century of groundbreaking art

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl With Ball” gets star billing for the High Museum of Art exhibition opening Saturday, “Fast Forward: Modern Moments, 1913-2013,” and it’s hard to argue against the massive exposure the lipsticked, swimsuited gal with a beach ball is receiving.

“Girl With Ball” is one of pop art’s most famed masterworks, so why not use it on billboards, print ads, even the show catalog cover to help sell an exhibit drawn from the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection that examines transformative years in 20th-century artmaking and life?

After all, “Girl” (1961) even started with an ad that Lichtenstein lifted from a Pocono Mountains hotel, giving it his signature comic book-style treatment. His transformation made the image even more graphic and “read” even better as an ad.

But we’re not in the Poconos anymore: This time, “Girl” is pitching one of the largest troves of 20th-century art ever shown in the Southeast.

Still, among the 164 works by 105 artists displayed in “Fast Forward,” a major presentation in the High’s multiyear partnership with New York’s MoMA, there are pieces that may even better represent the exhibit’s theme of revelatory art being created during a century of rapid-fire revolutionary change.

Consider Italian artist Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” created in 1913. That’s the first of six key times — including 1929, 1950, 1961, 1988 and the art of today — on which the exhibit focuses. Boccioni was a futurist, a largely Italian movement that embraced the new in the new century: speed, technology, the nonstop motion of industrial cities. The sculptor’s polished bronze figure appears like a sleek machine, or perhaps a superhero, primed to bolt forward.

Forward motion is also the implicit message of “Double Standard,” a 1961 black-and-white photograph by artist and actor Dennis Hopper. Shot through the windshield of an automobile in Los Angeles, the image shows the car approaching a fork in the road, leaving behind a past suggested by the traffic captured in the rearview mirror. It’s an exhibit favorite of High Museum modern and contemporary art curator Michael Rooks, symbolizing to him modern artists’ charge toward an uncharted future.

Finding personal favorites will no doubt be a big part of the pleasure of visiting “Modern Moments,” a show with a broader scope than “Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters,” whose successful High run ended in April. The bookend exhibit opening Saturday ambitions to chart a century in constant flux, as artists responded to major world events from World War I and the Great Depression to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Wall’s fall.

Sometimes the artistic processing of these watershed moments is overt, sometimes it’s far from specific. But it’s hard to complain when your guides to one of history’s greatest periods of change include Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Jeff Koons.

Note that the odd end date in the exhibit title, 2013, is not a typo. In organizing an exhibit that eyes 20th-century art in the rear view, the High commissioned new works by Sarah Sze, Aaron Curry and Katharina Grosse. The suggestion is that there’s enough modern fuel in the tank to propel artmaking deeper into this uncertain century.

‘FAST FORWARD: MODERN MOMENTS’ HIGHLIGHTS

Umberto Boccioni: “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913)

Inspired by the possibilities of where modern life was quickly leading, futurists such as Boccioni sought to express themselves with a new, supercharged visual language.

“Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it,” the sculptor once exclaimed.

In contrast to traditional sculptures that were static, Boccioni attempted to depict this figure striding forward.

“So you get the sense of movement, but also by taking the body and stretching it out, you get the sense of the stride of moving from one place to the next,” MoMA show curator Jodi Hauptman noted.

“Here’s something that’s about transition and change.”

Salvador Dalí: “Illumined Pleasures” (1929)

This small but detailed oil painting is inspired by cinema screens and the stories illuminated upon them, a perfect way for the Spanish surrealist to parse reality and illusion.

“You can just imagine these three little theater boxes as a way of looking cinematically, as if Dalí is projecting these images onto the screens,” said Samantha Friedman, MoMA assistant curator. “So it’s a new vision that’s technological, but you can also think about it as a psychological projection.”

Speaking of, that’s Dalí’s disembodied noggin in the middle box, while an allegory of a particular male anxiety-provoking scenario plays out below.

Further affirming the cinema connection, the painting was reproduced in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste” alongside the shooting script for “Un Chien Andalou,” the eye-slicing film Dalí made with Luis Buñuel.

Franz Kline: “Chief” (1950)

Kline had been a figurative painter until the late 1940s, when he projected some of his drawings onto a wall and discovered that their magnified marks became abstract yet hit with a new force.

“Early on these paintings were called action paintings, because of the very idea of art as an arena for action and the [notion that critics of the time proffered] of the artist as the bull in the ring,” Hauptman said. “Now we use the term abstract expressionism to get at the idea that this gesture has some kind of meaning or emotion.”

“Chief” was the name of a locomotive Kline recalled from his Pennsylvania childhood, when he had been captivated by the railroad. But the artist cautioned against reading the painting’s big, physical marks as that.

Indeed Kline once said of his abstract work that he painted “not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking.”

Lee Bontecou: “Untitled” (1961)

Many artists in the early ’60s were beginning to reconnect their work to everyday life, leading some to repurpose ordinary objects into their compositions.

For this work, Bontecou scavenged soiled canvas from conveyor belts discarded by a laundry located below her New York apartment and stretched it on a steel armature. The soot-hued piece laced with sharp copper wire is mounted on the wall but projects out, “almost aggressively confronting you in your space,” Friedman said.

Blurring the line between painting and sculpture, it seems to respond to stresses of the time, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, the threat of nuclear war and the space race.

“It almost looks like the work could be part of a spaceship that you could ride into space,” Friedman said, “but at the same time, it could be a black hole that’s going to suck you in when you get there.”

Ashley Bickerton: “Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles)” (1987-1988)

“You are what you buy” might be the motto for this self-portrait by the British artist who expresses his identity via an arrangement of corporate logos for the goods he consumes.

It’s a somewhat cynical depiction, in Hauptman’s view, but she sees it fitting in the context of the late ’80s when the economy was booming and artists “were thinking about consumption in an echo to the way they were thinking about consumption in pop [art] in 1961.”

At the margins of “Tormented,” Bickerton repeats “Susie,” his signature for this series. Fittingly it’s executed in the graphic style of a corporate insignia.