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.
“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 . 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 , 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 .
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,” he said, “but it’s wonderful to see in this painting.”
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