What are the “means” that modern artists use
to express their aesthetic concerns? Until now, attempts to examine modern
art have focused on evaluating different techniques or movements: the various
“isms” found in history books. For decades, the standard approach to modern
art was to examine its unfolding movements as a linear progression of formal
developments, each one leading to the next. In recent years, however, thematic
studies have gained authority, and many scholars have examined art through
its sociopolitical context in its time and place. Still others have focused
on the artist’s biography, psychology, and gender.
“Modern Means” finds its own way to tell this complex story by adopting
a thematic approach and arranging the MoMA collection into the categories
of “primal,” “reductive,” “commonplace” and “mutable.” This approach not
only helps to clarify the definition of modern art but also reveals clear
links between the early masterpieces of Munch, Picasso, Matisse or Leger
and the work being created today.
Each of the exhibition’s four zones focuses on a concern of a specific period;
history, however, is fluid and amorphous, and “Modern Means” charts recurrences
of these themes throughout modernity, acknowledging both their historical
variations and their enduring nature. The two opening sections of the exhibition
examine the fundamental desire to strip things back to an essential core,
while the last two are more concerned with alchemy, focusing on the ways
in which art transforms reality.
The exhibition’s first section, Primal, covers
the years 1880 to 1920, the fin-de-siecle period of the nineteenth century
and the turbulent early decades of the twentieth. Here, works by such artists
as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, redolent with mystery, examine such subjects
as anxiety, loneliness, sexuality, and death. These basic human issues,
however, are constant concerns in art, as later works by Jackson Pollock
and Louise Bourgeois show.
The next section, Reductive,
follows the development, between 1920 and 1950, of an abstract visual language,
and particularly of a geometric art sharing rational principles with a core
of spirituality and idealism - as, for example, in the paintings of Piet
Mondrian and the architecture and design of Gerrit Rietveld. The period
also fostered an organic, nature-derived abstraction, seen here in works
by Georgia O’Keeffe and Constantin Brancusi. Cubism offers a notable precedent
for abstract reduction, which continues to appear today in the spare and
ethereal paintings of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.
Commonplace, the exhibition’s third
section, covers the years 1950 to 1970, which saw an explosion of commercial
imagery in art, inspired by and addressing the burgeoning media of mass
communication and advertising. Precedents appear in the collages of Kurt
Schwitters and the photographs of Walker Evans, but this section centers
on Pop art, which shocked public and critics alike with its confrontational
imagery and bold presentation. Certain artists today, including Andreas
Gursky and Jeff Koons, sustain this preoccupation with the concerns of daily
life.
Finally, Mutable looks at the recent and contemporary
period, beginning around 1970, and underscores themes of disequilibrium,
transformation, and metamorphosis, whether in the “social sculpture”
of Joseph Beuys or the cryptic universe of Matthew Barney. A similar sense
of disorienting flux had appeared much earlier in the amorphous compositions
of Jean Arp and Joan Miro, who parsed the conscious and unconscious realms
as interchangeable.
“Modern Means” has been specially assembled by MoMA curators, Deborah Wye
and Wendy Weitman, in cooperation with David Elliott and Mori Art Museum
curator Kim Sunhee. |
