At The Dawn Of A New Age

 Early 20th Century American Modernism at the Whitney Museum in New York City.  On exhibit are works produced between 1900 and 1930.  

“progressive initiatives heralded cultural shifts by challenging existing social and economic norms … many American artists adopted the new and experimental over the traditional, rejecting realism in favor of art that gave precedence to emotional experience and harmonious design.”

Charles Shaw 1892-1974, NYC, painter, poet (1200 published poems), writer for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair studied at Yale, Columbia (architecture), and the Art Students League.  Connected by birth to the Woolworth family fortune he was orphaned at 3 and raised with his twin brother by an Uncle.  He served as a lieutenant in the First World War but never saw action and never married, no children. He is known for ‘Geometric Biomorphic Abstraction’.  At the Whitney: 

“Self Portrait”

Marsden Hartley, 1877 Lewiston, Maine , 1943, Ellsworth Maine, artist, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Cleveland School of Art, NY School of Art under William Merritt Chase and the NationalAcademy of Design. He traveled to Europe for the first time in 1912 and in Paris met Gertrude Stein and the avant-garde.  In 1913 he traveled to Berlin met Kandinsky and the Prussian Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg who died in the First World War.

He never addressed his sexuality and is represented in the exhibit with 

“Portrait of a German Officer”

the Iron Cross, Flag of Bavaria, military emblems, fragments of the Royal Guard’s Uniform and a chessboard create an abstract portrait with the golden #24; symbolic perhaps of Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, dead at the age of 24.

Chiura Obama, Okayama, Japan 1885, Berkeley, Ca. 1975.  “He worked to fuse sumi-e’s fluid brushwork, a reverence for nature based in Zen Buddhism and the three dimensional perspective of Western art.”

Untitled (Lakeshore) 1920-1929

Pamela Colman Smith, 1878 London, England, 1951, Bude, England, artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist best known for illustrating the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and over 20 books, wrote two books on Jamaican folklore (she lived in Jamaica for awhile), edited two magazines and ran the Green Leaf Press, focused on woman writers.  She had a studio in London in 1901, an open house for artists, authors, actors.  Arthur Ransome describes an evening there in his 1907 ‘Bohemia in London’. It was probably at her salon where W.B.Yeats introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics. Here is her watercolor from 1903, 

“The Wave”

Elie Nadelman, 1882 Warsaw, Poland, 1946, Riverdale, Bronx, New York, 

‘Spring’, 1911

Leo Stein was an early supporter and owned one of his cubist portraits.

Nadelman moved to New York, married Viola Flannery, a wealthy heiress, in 1920.  They settled in Riverdale and collected thousands of pieces of folk art which they displayed in their Museum of Folk art in Riverdale.  The New York Historical Society eventually bought the collection of over 15,000 pieces.  Viola’s wealth vanished in the 1929 crash; the art world lost interest in Ellie’s efforts and he packed much of it away in his attic where it disintegrated.  Some other pieces were destroyed by workmen sent to remodel his studio.  His reputation has grown since 1948 when MoMA exhibited this work:

‘Man in the Open Air’

There are 60 works by 48 Artists in this Exhibition.  This is a sampling, my takeaway after one visit.