Carnegie show captures artists, art at ‘Crossroads’
World War II exacted an exorbitant price in lost lives and stripped many Americans of their innocence.
Artists responded to the stark postwar world by stripping away embellishment, showing the core of their creations. Alberto Giacometti did it with “Walking Man I,” a sculpture of an emaciated man striding forward. Abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning created “Woman VI,” a deconstructedportrait of a barely recognizablehuman being.
“Crossroads: Carnegie Museum of Art’s Collection, 1945 to Now,” a long-term exhibition that opened Friday at the Oakland museum, highlights the role artists play in daily life. Its title was inspired by a 1976 film, “Crossroads,” that shows a mesmerizing series of atomic underwater blasts detonated on
July 25, 1946, near the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
These 146 artworks are a series of quiet yet dramatic explosions. Eric Crosby, the Carnegie’s curator of modern and contemporary art, has eliminated architectural clutter from the galleries and selected strong canvases and sculptures from the museum’s permanent collection, particularly “Don’t Be Cruel” by Elizabeth Murray and “Vivien Baseball Cap” by Alex Katz.
Each of the eight galleries has a theme: A New Horizon, Call of the Wild, More than Minimal, Night Poetry, Artists’ Cinema, Less Than Half the Picture, The Persistence of Painting, and Free Radicals.
One gallery is devoted to a group of avant-garde Northern European artists who rose amid the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and ’50s. This school of painters was called CoBrA, after the cities of their origins: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Leon Arkus, the art museum’s late director, championed their work.
CoBrA artists Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and others created colorful, exuberant paintings influenced by surrealism, myth, poetry and art by children as well as untrained outsider artists. Officially the CoBrA school disbanded in 1951, but its members kept painting and writing well into the 1970s.
During the 1960s and 1970s, minimalism dominated the American art scene. Leading artists included Ellsworth Kelly, whose vivid, geometric paintings are shown here alongside the work of Martin Puryear, a sculptor who turned book-matched Ponderosa pine into an elegant homage to nature’s sublime way with wood.
A Night Poetry gallery focuses on dreams and nightmares, exhibiting the work of Pittsburgh native Raymond Saunders, abstract expressionist William Baziotes and an installation by the singular Louise Bourgeois.
Artists’ Cinema will show a rotating program of experimental films and videos made in the 1970s and ’80s to demonstrate how moving images have transformed artistic practice since World War II.
While some artists view painting as obsolete, the three-dimensional work of Phyllida Barlow and the intimacy of Mr. Katz’s canvas suggest otherwise.
The last gallery, Free Radicals, features Kerry James Marshall, whose figurative paintings highlight how African-Americans have been excluded from the history of Western painting. This gallery also holds “Fountain (reparations version)” by Pope.L. The Chicago-based artist uses the upside-down fountain to comment on the history of Jim Crow laws in America and the water crisis in Flint, Mich.