Burton Wasserman, June 2014

Dr. Burton Wasserman is a professor emeritus of Art at Rowan University, and a serious artist of long standing.

American Legends

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    The 20th century was a period filled with significant breakthroughs in the world of contemporary American art. This remarkable fact of cultural life is superbly documented by the exhibition titled American Legends, currently on view on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art at 75th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City.

    Examples of painting and sculpture by many of the individuals who contributed to this reputation will remain in place through October 19, 2014. As overview shows tend to go, this particular installation has to be one of the best to come down the pike in many and many a day. Without question, the list of talented artists represented, is nothing short of staggering.

    Two clearly defined aesthetic directions stand out. They are pictorial representation and abstraction. Together, they exemplify approaches that gave expression to both the evolution of modernism in art form and the continuity of traditional pictorial imagery from the past to the present.

    Among the key figures in the show who dealt daringly with the first group there are exceptional examples by Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, and Burgoyne Diller. Calder’s path was affected by major European talents whose achievements touched him deeply when he lived and worked in France after the end of World War I. Specifically, the show offers kinetic mobiles he constructed early on, as well as paintings and still-sculpture (stabiles) he put together during the long span of years he spent as a creative pioneer in the use of geometric and biomorphic shapes in space. Perhaps the one interesting reservation some spectators have with Calder’s art is that his vocabulary of form is so playful and easy to enjoy, they find it difficult to attribute a truly serious level of profound significance to his admittedly ingenious accomplishments.

    Stuart Davis was deeply influenced by American jazz and the cubist paintings he saw while living in France. When he came back home to his native land, his modernist compositions and his dedication to teaching made a considerable impact on the thinking and artistic development of his young and aspiring pupils. Incidentally, it is especially rewarding to see how paintings of his, going back to the 1920s and ‘30s still hold up today, as well as when they were first composed, decades ago.

    The early modern movements—Constructivism in Russia and De Stijl in The Netherlands—were chiefly concerned with proclaiming a universal need for a utopian sense of equilibrium. In the United States, the first artist to adapt this philosophy as the foundation for his creative aspirations was Burgoyne Diller. His concern for dynamic balance and exquisite aesthetic serenity given shape in pure plastic terms, became a consuming passion. Typically, the selections from his hand, installed at the Whitney, demonstrate the extraordinary range of variation he could bring to a style that was limited to the sole use of horizontal-vertical shape relationships and the most abbreviated possible use of pure, primary colors. His “Third Theme,” of 1946-48 is a superb example of rhythmic complexity combined with a discretely unified, overall sense of accord.

    Superb selections by such eminent pictorialists of the last century as Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence and Alice Neel bring a fine measure of stylistic balance to the overall installation. Their gift for effectively dealing with such subject matter areas as the human figure and appearances of the everday surrounding world is absolutely superb.

    Beautiful artworks by Georgia O’Keeffe offering a vision frequently labeled as Magic Realism, provide a bridge joining a richly naturalistic idiom with inroads into abstraction. The exotic color and offbeat perspective she brought to interpreting flower forms and out-of-doors western scenes is especially memorable.

    High praise for Barbara Haskell of the Museum staff, who organized the exhibition, is certainly well deserved.

        Shown: Edward Hopper ( 1882 1967).  New York Interior, (c. 1921). Oil on canvas, 24 5/16 x 29 3/8in. (61.8 x 74.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest  70.1200. © Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper,  licensed by the Whitney Museum of American Art