Reimagining Modernism

[fusion_text]I don’t mind it when museums shake things up, to make you look at familiar works afresh and introduce new ones, but what the Met has done with its Modernism collection (1900-1950) is to destroy the context of its art without adding any new focus, leaving pieces dangling like isolated leaves on a naked branch. Compounding the problem, they have looked for organizing themes, like “Work and Industry,” that result in inferior works (by the Met’s standards) being displayed, just because they fit that rubric.

For starters, the named themes aren’t always helpful. What does “Retreat” stand for; what does “Direct Expression” mean? “Retreat I,” it is explained, is a retreat from modern urban life into the artist’s mind. Not surprisingly, then, this gallery features the Surrealists. Why this is different or better than a gallery called “Surrealism” is not clear. “Retreat II,” has no such parallel, nor any concentration at all. It is described as retreat to history or nature, or to a place – but instead of offering an assortment of landscapes, we get Grant Wood’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere next to an Art Deco screen from Solomon Guggenheim’s home designed by Jean Dunand. The provocative Mountain by Balthus hangs adjacent to a retrograde Wisconsin Landscape by John Steuart Curry. Hopper is next to Feininger is next to O’Keeffe. All the above works date from approximately the same decade, but what else do they have in common? More to the point, what light do they shed on each other?

The Metropolis is an easy curatorial crutch: let’s pull out pictures of the modern city. But, given all the masterworks the Met possesses, do we really need a gallery with two works by Louis Guglielmi, four by Florine Stettheimer and very minor pieces by Chagall, Dubuffet, Leon Kroll and Guy Pene duBois? The same can be said for Work and Industry, which includes a minor Benton of wheat harvesters next to a minor Rockwell of a mailman, which in turn have nothing to do with a Boccioni or a Bumpei Usui (who?).

Bodies is the cumbersome heading for the gallery of portraits, perhaps so it can include, seemingly out of the blue, Dali’s Crucifixion. A grouping of works by DeKooning, Alice Neel and Walt Kuhn contributes nothing to our understanding of those artists, or the field of portraiture. Abstraction is an easy catch-all and makes obvious sense although, again, the selections are so disparate as to be meaningless as an ensemble. Avant-Garde is a more traditional grouping of the School of Paris and related Europeans: Gris, Leger, Picasso, Severini, Boccioni. It hardly represents a “reimagining” of anything.

The final grouping is called Direct Expression, which someone apparently believes describes art that references “primitive” sources – such as African and Folk Art. It is frankly disconcerting, however, to see Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein in the company of deservedly unknown works by Morris Hirshfield, John Kane, Henri Rousseau and William Zorach.

One oddity is seeing works by Marsden Hartley show up in almost every one of the categories. His vision doesn’t really change, but by depicting slightly different subject matter he is deemed to qualify everywhere, which adds further evidence, to me, of the pointlessness of the Met’s exercise.[/fusion_text]

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