Hammer Galleries Show Great Masters of the Modern Movement

Written by Xavier Constante Friday, 27 January 2012 20:44

New York, NY - The great masters of the Modern Movement (which in fact began its life over a century ago, with the sensational appearance of the Fauves in the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1905) retain their allure for a variety of reasons. One of the most important is that they seem to deserve the adjective ’modern’ in two different senses. They are modernist in a generically historical sense yet still seem very much of our own later time. This is not surprising, if we consider that two of their basic aims were, first, to clarify appearances, often reducing these to their most basic forms; and secondly, to communicate emotional states through both form and color. A painting or drawing by one of the great experimental masters of the high modernist epoch nearly always has immediate appeal. We encounter it, and it at once begins to communicate what it has to say. At the same time, however, these are not superficial artists. Everything they did shows how determined they were to break down and remake visual conventions. We respond instinctively to the exuberant energy of their work. Currently on view at Hammer Galleries, and you can enjoy a virtual tour at : http://vtg.virtualtourgallery.com/vtg-0111/

There are a number of things that are fascinating about these modernist masters, which are perhaps not always sufficiently considered by art historians. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that they matured as artists in an age when culture was drastically broadening its boundaries. The influence exercised by African tribal art over Picasso, and other painters of his generation, is of course widely understood. What is not perhaps so fully understood was that this represented a new phase in an enlargement of European sensibility and European knowledge that had been going on since Commodore Perry forced open the ports of Japan in 1854. The leading modernists understood that culture was becoming increasingly plural, and that the idea that some things were essentially ‘exotic’, external to the European sensibility, was being replaced by a situation where the range of choices, and therefore of artistic opportunities, was much wider. They had the strength of character to make those choices, to launch themselves into new ways of thinking about art.

Paris, in particular, became the centre for an international community of artists. Some of them were French, but the city also offered its hospitality to artists from an increasingly wide range of other nationalities. Some, like Marc Chagall, came from communities that had never produced artists of international note before. The result was a mixture between a stewpot and a laboratory. A stewpot, because all kinds of cultural traditions were blended together. A laboratory, because this was where artistic ideas were continually tested to their limits. Nothing like this artistic community had ever existed previously, not even in Rome, during the 17th century, when artists from northern Europe flocked to Italy, to complete their technical and intellectual education. Nothing like it has existed since, not even in New York, during and immediately after World War II.

The School of Paris, as it came to be called, was a community where a myriad of apparently contradictory ideas were given free play. Some of these ideas were linked to the rapid evolution of technology. Technology was identified with the idea of material progress. It was also linked to the notion of threat. Many of the leading modernists, among them Fernand Léger, had very direct experience of both the bright and the dark faces of technology through service in the armies of World War I. The war killed millions, among their ranks a number of highly gifted artists, such as Franz Marc and Umberto Boccioni, who might have gone on to much greater things had their lives been spared. It also vastly accelerated the pace of technological development.

Fascination with technology, paradoxically, went hand in hand with a search for a special kind of innocence – visual innocence, where the artist tried to see the world surrounding him as if encountering it for the very first time. Picasso’s famous aphorism, “I do not seek, I find,” neatly summarizes this aspect of the modernist sensibility.

Hammer Galleries today continues its tradition of building treasured collections for individuals, corporations and museums worldwide. This tradition dates back to its founding in 1928 by industrialist and philanthropist Dr. Armand Hammer. Visit : http://www.hammergalleries.com/html/home.asp

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