Walker Art Center Hosts " Body Politics: Figurative Prints and Drawings "

Written by Ingvar Sorensson Tuesday, 27 December 2011 22:50

Minneapolis, MN - Some 60 works of art by more than two dozen artists, including Egon Schiele, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Georgia O’Keeffe, are featured at the Walker Art Center in Body Politics: Figurative Prints and Drawings from Schiele to de Kooning, an exhibition that explores the expressive potential of the human figure.  Drawn primarily from public and private collections in the Twin Cities, the exhibition will be on view through July 15, 2007, in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery.  At any given historical moment, a great deal can be understood about a culture through its images of the human body.  These may be simply descriptive of a place and time, or they might be critiques, comments, observations, or exhortations to change.

Whether fashion ads, state portraits, news photos, or works of visual art, they always offer insight into the culture in which they were made, and sometimes even help bring about change by making explicit what cannot be stated or will not be acknowledged.  In this way, figurative images are political—in revealing us to ourselves, they stimulate debate about the issues that trouble us most.

Body Politics: Figurative Prints and Drawings from Schiele to de Kooning features approximately 60 works of art made in Europe, the U.S., and Mexico during the first half of the 20th century, a time when the Western world was changing rapidly and often violently.  Revolution, economic depression, labor struggles, and wars wracked Europe and North America.  Conventions governing gender roles and sexuality collapsed as women gained the right to vote and entered the work force.  Urban centers expanded at breakneck speed, racial strife percolated, colonizing nations retreated.  By the time World War II was over, massive change was underway in almost every realm of social, political, and private life.  Artists reflected these conditions in images of the human body that are variously polemical, celebratory, heartrending, and heartfelt.  Body Politics brings together this group of once-inflammatory works at a moment in our history when artists have returned to the figure as a vehicle for explicit political commentary. 

 Body Politics is divided into several thematic areas.  Anchoring a section on “transgressive sexuality” will be five works by Austrian provocateur Egon Schiele, who was jailed in 1912 after his work was declared pornographic.  His nude self-portraits and voyeuristic drawings of lesbian couples and young girls are still challenging, and reveal as much about the confining, conservative culture in which he worked as they do about Schiele’s own private appetites.  This section will also include veiled homoerotic vignettes by American artists Paul Cadmus and Jared French; a pastel drawing of a sublimely sexualized clam shell by Georgia O’Keeffe; and a page from a disturbing graphic novel—by self-taught recluse Henry Darger—that chronicles the adventures of an army of young girls.

A second section of the exhibition addresses the broad cultural fascination with “the primitive”—the customs, objects, and religions of African and Oceanic tribal cultures.  The tendency to eroticize and idealize these (usually colonized) peoples figured in many of the high-modernist developments of the period, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism. Body Politics will explore this theme through works by German Expressionists Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Max Beckmann, and Emil Nolde.  The latter’s lithograph Dancer (1913) suggests Nolde’s fascination with dance as an expression of primal, physical abandon.  Drawings, prints, and sculptures by Willem de Kooning, Paul Klee, and Joseph Beuys experiment with archetypal images of the female body as devouring or earthy.  The fourth section of the exhibition presents impassioned and powerful images deploring war, poverty, and the devastation wrought by inhumane political regimes.  The effects on both individuals and society at large came under scrutiny by artists such as Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, who made wrenching images of grief and poverty, and George Grosz, who focused on the brutality of Weimar-era military and government policies.  Highlights include the gouache Breastfeeding (1939), a stark depiction of rural American poverty by WPA artist James Baare Turnbull, and Pablo Picasso’s magnificent 1937 etching Weeping Woman, one of the many images he made in response to the Spanish Civil War.

Works in the exhibition are drawn primarily from public and private collections in the Twin Cities.  The Minneapolis Institute of Arts contributed 10 objects as part of the institutions’ ongoing effort to program collaboratively.  The Weisman Art Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, each have loaned several works. Other objects come from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center, and several local private collections. 

The vitality and depravity of the modern city was a fertile subject for artists during this period.  Europeans made unflinching exposés of the social and moral decadence that ravaged their declining cities, while Americans celebrated the theater and energy of street life in New York and other large metropolises.  In addition to works by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Reginald Marsh, a highlight of this section is a group of prints by Isabel Bishop that depict everyday moments in the lives of the shop girls, secretaries, and blue collar working women around New York’s Union Square neighborhood, where Bishop maintained a studio for many years.  An African American view of city life is explored through works by Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

Body Politics: Figurative Prints and Drawings from Schiele to de Kooning is organized by the Walker Art Center and guest-curated by Joan Rothfuss, the Walker’s former curator for the permanent collection.

The Walker Art Center is located at 1750 Hennepin Avenue—where Hennepin meets Lyndale—one block off Highways I-94 and I-394, in Minneapolis, MN. For public information, call 612.375.7600, or visit www.walkerart.org