Modern in America, is an installation of more than 90 works drawn from Seattle Art Museum's (SAM) permanent collection. It is a selective survey of American modernist movements from 1905 to the present day. Organized by Susan Rosenberg, SAM’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art, the installation includes paintings, photographs and mixed art.
Modern in America begins with the museum’s remarkably rich collection of paintings by the earliest exponents of modernism in America: artists who participated in the circles of Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering “291” gallery (1905-17) and Louis and Walter Arensberg’s New York Dada Salon during World War I. Featured are major works by Georgia O’Keeffe’s (including A Celebration, 1924), John Marin and Marsden Hartley, as well as photographs by those who waged the first battles for photography’s status as fine art, including images from Camera Work by Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. The installation also presents oil paintings from the museum’s unmatched collection of works by John Covert, cousin of Walter Arensberg and an artist now widely recognized for his idiosyncratic and distinctive contribution to the New York Dada movement.
A post-World War II generation went about reinventing modernism for itself in the form of a return to primitivism and the unconscious, as embodied in the exquisitely crafted signature paintings reflected in SAM’s celebrated collection of Abstract Expressionism, including Jackson Pollock’s Sea Change (1947), Mark Rothko’s Number 11 (1947), and Willem de Kooning’s Woman (1943). The radically altered vocabulary of art-making reflected in a successive generation of artists is represented with several works from SAM’s collection by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly. The exhibition also includes two major works borrowed from local collections: Ellsworth Kelly’s Red and White, 1963, Jasper Johns’, Harlem Light, 1967, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Manuscript, 1963, a partial and promised gift to the museum. These artists individually and collectively displaced art-making to art perception, moving away from the subjective, unconscious and personal to embrace the cerebral, the systematic and the everyday.
Also featured is a selection of prints from The Stockholm Project, a portfolio conceived by the New York-based “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T.) - which had a Seattle branch in the late 1960s. Made in 1971, and donated to the Seattle Art Museum by Robert Rauschenberg, it provides a mini-survey of artists of the minimal, conceptual and fluxus movements, including Sol Lewitt, Hans Haacke, Nam June Paik and others, demonstrating the profound shift to an art of mechanical reproduction. A rich collection of works by Andy Warhol includes Double Elvis, 1964, and the rare multiple Kiss, 1966. Warhol’s embrace of photographic reproduction, as well as American typologies, looks simultaneously backward and forward. The deep and continuing influence of cinema on painting emanates from Andy Warhol to Edward Ruscha (with An Exhibition of Gasoline Powered Engines, 1993) and John Baldessari (in Blue Pole: Two Men With Guns and Woman (Hands to Ears), 1997).
Cinematic influences are also evident in works by Sue de beers, Deborah Mesa Pelli and Catherine Opie, younger photographers included in the installation. Their large-scale photographic works, which conclude Modern in America, not only declare the warm embrace of photography as just one art form among many today, but also the evolution of photographic technologies and its status as manipulated versus true.
100 University St., downtown Seattle
July 8, 2004 – January 4, 2006
