FEBRUARY 03 - APRIL 02, 2005
Red Flowers and Purple Vase
HAR-019-OM
In February and March of 2005, Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents "American Modern," an exhibition highlighting the development of modernism in the American visual arts. Curated by Director Michael Hackett, the exhibition brings together superb examples of American modernist painting and sculpture created between 1907 and 1942.
The show will chronicle modernism’s early importation from Europe by artists such as Hans Hofmann, Max Weber, Elie Nadelman, and Gaston Lachaise through its indigenous assimilation and subsequent evolution, as seen in paintings by Milton Avery, Marden Hartley, and John Marin. Works by Arthur Dove, John Graham, Walt Kuhn, and Georgia O’Keefe, among others, will also be on display.
According to Michael Hackett, "it’s my goal to include the finest examples of American modernism in order to trace the development of a distinct modernist aesthetic in the United States separate from its European antecedents. I am quite proud to bring this remarkable group of rarely seen twentieth-century masterworks to San Francisco."
Specific themes addressed in the show focus on how late 19th- and early 20th-century European modernism was translated into a specifically American idiom and how it later laid the groundwork for abstract expressionism. The experiments in color, composition, and perspective conducted by the European avant-garde—Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso—were processed, digested, and reconstituted in numerous ways: Marin married the shocking color of the fauves with the grandeur of the American landscape, while Weber played a critical role in disseminating the achievements of Cézanne and the cubists throughout the United States. Others like Avery, Hartley, and O’Keefe rejected the romanticism of 19th-century landscape painting and created images based on their own intensely personal visions.
By the 1940s, the American avant-garde, having adapted the lessons offered by the Europeans, was ready to look inward and express their most elemental urges and emotions, in what was ultimately to become abstract expressionism.