MIDCENTURY MODERN
The list of exhibitors in “When Modern Was Contemporary: Selections From the Roy R. Neuberger Collection” reads like a who’s who of early to mid-20th-century artists: Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence, Adolph Gottlieb and Richard Diebenkorn. Of particular interest locally is Romare Bearden’s large collage “Melon Season,” which is displayed near a small gem, a birthday wish to the collector. Bearden lived for a period in Pittsburgh, and his tile mural “Pittsburgh Recollections” graces the Gateway Center light-rail station. Also, “Marilyn Monroe” by Willem de Kooning, the only of his famed “Woman” series to feature an actual person. “Woman VI” is in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection.
But there are several surprises and lesser knowns among the 49 works at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, which is hosting the show organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, State University of New York.
Westmoreland exhibit showcases works from fertile period in 20th-century art
The period’s rapidly shifting stylistic predilections are well represented and energize the galleries, as in, among others, David Smith’s “Billiard Player III” cubism, Charles Sheeler’s “The Web (Croton Dam)” precisionism and Josef Albers’ “Study to Homage to the Square: Ritardando” color theory experimentation.
Powerful works by the movement’s two most important artists embody social realism: Ben Shahn’s intense “Blind Accordion Player” and the conniving politicians of Jack Levine’s “The Banquet.”
Most of the mainly two-dimensional works in this exhibition are by men, which is reflective of the interests of the art market and art institutions during the time period.
Among those by women is O’Keeffe’s “Lake George by Early Moonrise,” a medley of green hills and trees painted in 1930 at husband Alfred Stieglitz’s family summer compound. Her palette would change dramatically after she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, where she created the work for which she is most known. Also notable are Helen Frankenthaler’s abstracted “Mount Sinai,” Grace Hartigan’s expressionistic “Giftwares,” and Lee Krasner’s abstract mixed media “Burning Candles,” which hangs across from husband Pollock’s large drip painting “Number 8, 1949.”
Illustrative of the variability even within movements, such as abstract expressionism, is Mark Rothko’s 1956 “Old Gold Over White,” which hangs nearby. It’s similar in size but vertical and contemplative as opposed to Pollock’s horizontal maelstrom of line and color.
Discoveries that inspire further research include Louis Michel Eilshemius and Forrest Bess. Eilshemius’ “The Dream” — nude women cavorting in the countryside — is a mix of folk art sensibility, Matisse’s dancers and Dali. Self-described as an educator, exactor, amateur all-around doctor, mesmerist-prophet and mystic, reader of hands and faces and linguist of five languages, Eilshemius descended into poverty and died in the psychiatric ward of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital shortly after his admission.
Bess’ seemingly straightforward small painting, “Before Man,” is actually symbolically plaintive. The imagery has been interpreted as representing male and female bodies with markings that reference surgical experiments the artist underwent with the intent of transforming into a hermaphrodite. While others found some of his pursuits distasteful, Texas Monthly wrote that for his neighbors he was “an exemplar of that legendary, cherished, and vilified figure the small-town eccentric.”
Two of Mr. Neuberger’s favorite artists were Horace Pippin and Marsden Hartley, and he kept their paintings with him most of his life. Pippin’s genre painting “Cabin in the Cotton” received honorable mention when exhibited in “Painting in the United States, 1944” (which replaced the Carnegie International during war years) at the Carnegie Institute.
Hartley painted “Fisherman’s Last Supper, Nova Scotia” in memory of two members of a family he had befriended who drowned in a boating accident. The deceased sons are seated at the ends of the table across from empty chairs draped with wreaths. Lightened areas of paint above their heads block out the halos and stars originally there, and two paintings of ships hang on the walls.
Financier Roy R. Neuberger (1903-2010) was inspired to collect the work of living artists when he read that Vincent van Gogh died impoverished. A philanthropist and arts advocate, he never sold works he’d purchased and said he was driven by the “sheer love of objects and love of some of the artists that I knew.”
In 1967 then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller asked Neuberger to consider donating his collection to the State University of New York to form his namesake museum. Two years later he made a promised gift of approximately 300 artworks.
This exhibition is tribute to both the collector and to the artists whose legacies he championed.
M. Thomas: mthomas@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1925.