Vibrant Expression
Living Color, Modern Life explores the careers of Hugh Henry Breckenridge and Arthur B. Carles
Living Color, Modern Life explores the careers of Hugh Henry Breckenridge and Arthur B. Carles
Living Color, Modern Life: Hugh Henry Breckenridge and Arthur B. Carles is an exhibition exploring the careers of two Philadelphia artists and educators whose work and contributions to the development of American modernism has been under recognized. It will be shown October 5 through November 2 at Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
The early years of the 20th century were vibrant with change in the art world as well as resistance to it. Interest in the development of modernism centered on Newyork City, often eclipsing developments in centers like Philadelphia,taos and Santa Fe.
Breckenridge and Carles trained traditionally at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) in Philadelphia and both returned there to teach. In her catalog essay, Nicole Amoroso writes,“breckenridge and Carles were both outside the circle of Stieglitz’s formidable influence and active promotion.
They remained in Philadelphia and deeply connected to the modernist modes of thought that were embraced there, which one could argue were less radical and more didactic.they were ‘Philadelphia Moderns,’ which during their own lifetimes did not decisively limit the scope of their influence or critical renown; however, their posthumous position in the canon of modern American art did suffer, as did Philadelphia’s station as an early center of modernist activity.the goal of this exhibition is to shine a light on these two exceptional modern artists and the city that helped to shape them.”
PAFA was a stronghold of academic tradition but embraced the innovations of impressionism and promoted American impressionism.when
The Armory Show thrust European modernism into the American scene in 1913, PAFA’S influence began to wane. Carles and Breckenridge, along with Henry Mccarter, later brought a modernist curriculum to the institution, restoring its status.
In her essay on Breckenridge in the exhibition catalog Laura Adams reveals his thoughts about abstraction. “As he wrote in his manuscript on painting, ‘All painting is, to a greater or lesser degree, abstract, as imitation is not possible.’ Furthermore he believed that the only difference between representational painting, which he termed ‘naturalistic,’ and abstract art was ‘the use of naturalistic forms in one and conceived forms in the other.’ He also suggested that abstract art might be the ‘purest form’ of painting, since, unlike representational art, it could not ‘distract’ the viewer with thoughts or memories that might be associated with more recognizable subject matter. For Breckenridge, painting abstractly gave him complete freedom to explore the four most basic elements of painting—line, color, form, and space—in their purest and most unadulterated manner.”
His painting The White Vase, 1913, while firmly in the academic still life category, shows the influences of impressionism and modernism in his broken brush strokes, combinations of complex patterns, and the items pushed back from a large negative space in the foreground.a painting titled simply, Abstraction, 1925, is of imagined forms. Adams comments,“…it still offers both a sense of form and space—certain shapes appear to recede into the picture plane while others advance forward, giving the picture a subtle appearance of dimensionality. Furthermore, Breckenridge uses both color and line to draw our eye slowly around the canvas.” Carles, in addition to his painting and teaching, brought three landmark exhibitions of modern art to PAFA in 1920, 1921 and 1923.
He painted still lifes throughout his career. Flowers, 1914, a monotype with pastel, made by impressing a painting of the flowers onto paper and embellishing it with pastel is in the bright colors for which he is well known.
His expressively vibrant Flowers (Abstract Still Life), circa 1932,“still bears some evidence of the floral arrangement that it references, and it shows Carles striving towards an ultimate synthesis of these two approaches, the structured, analytical style of Cubism and his own deeply intuitive impulse for color,”adams writes.
The reputation of both artists suffered from their lack of gallery representation and, in the case of Carles, a tragic accident that left him paralyzed for the last 10 years of his life. Modernism affected the art, music, literature and architecture of Philadelphia.this exhibition explores and reestablishes Carles’ and Breckenridge’s crucial roles.