Glens Falls, NY – The Hyde Collection will feature Facing Abstraction: Refiguring the Body in the Twentieth Century through December 10, 2006 in the Museum’s Charles R. Wood Gallery.  This exhibition, drawn from the Neuberger Museum of Art’s permanent collection, will pair selected artists’ writings with objects to offer a fresh perspective on the relationship between abstraction and figuration.  It highlights not only extraordinary works from that core collection, but also some of the museum’s impressive modern and postwar paintings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics by artists from around the world.  Among the artists represented are Milton Avery, Joan Brown, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Jacob Lawrence, and Henry Moore.

During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, critics who followed avant-garde trends often measured the success of figurative works in relation to abstraction.  This measurement overlooked artists’ own positions about the abstract body, which ranged from excitement to ambivalence and anxiety.  Avant-garde artists such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso became increasingly ambivalent about distinctions between abstraction and representation.  At the same time, the emergence of work that held no recognizable imagery for the viewer prompted many artists experimenting with abstraction to insist on maintaining recognizable form.  By the 1940s, artists as diverse as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Mark Rothko were not only advocates of subject matter but also suggested that art could not exist without it.  During the next decade, as critics effectively pitted abstraction against representation, many artists painting the figure felt conflicted as their works became suspect.