Cubist Fernand - Experimental museum of modern art comes to Frist Center
From the Smithsonian to the Art Institute of Chicago, museums have become the avenue through which we bestow cultural legitimacy on works of art — monolithic institutions with big front steps, security guards and brightly lit cafes serving overpriced sandwiches.
In 1920, however, Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray established what was then — and still is — an entirely radical notion for a museum. Their organization, the Société Anonyme, was an "experimental museum" with no walls, no international boundaries and no art historians or critics serving as arbiters of quality or relevance. Their overarching goal: to create venues for, and foster appreciation of, modern art.
Opening Friday at Frist Center for the Visual Arts, The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America chronicles that remarkable experiment, which spanned three decades and grew to include more than 1,000 pieces of art. Featuring 197 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, along with 10 cases of ephemera documenting the organization's existence, the exhibit was organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and drawn from the school's impressive collection. Nashville is the traveling show's final stop before it returns to New Haven, Conn., early next year.
Collection defies expectations
Compared to other exhibits at the Frist Center, this one is unique in that it doesn't follow a linear stylistic or chronological trajectory, explains Frist curator Mark Scala.
"People have certain expectations of modern art, and this doesn't conform to those expectations. It's a reflection of the Société Anonyme's founding principle that modern art is not necessarily best understood as a sequence of styles, in which Impressionism leads to post-Impressionism, which leads to Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Dada.
"Société Anonyme was composed of artists (rather than art historians) who were more interested in capturing the vitality and the cross-stylistic conversations artists were having at the time. A lot of the work is not purely identified as one style or another: You can see Surrealist, cubist fernand and Impressionist influences all in the same work."
Artists span globe
If the Société Anonyme exhibit confounds viewer expectations, that's hardly a trade-off, given the vibrancy of the work, which includes pieces by Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee and countless others who represented an international fellowship of modern artists. What's more, we're offered a vivid glimpse into these artists' milieu, a pivotal moment when the emergence of new ideas was unavoidably influenced and threatened by the instability of two global conflicts.
Exhibit curator Jennifer Gross, Seymour H. Knox Jr. curator of modern and contemporary art at Yale University Art Gallery, characterizes the Société Anonyme as "the collaboration of a generation of artists during a very dramatic time in the world economically and politically, in which they found a community based on a shared faith that modernism was a unifying cause in their fragmented society.
"World War II shattered and drove these artists all over the world, many of them into obscurity, whether that meant teaching at a community college in California or internment in a Nazi concentration camp. This collection held together all of these artists, and that's what's so extraordinary about it: We're not only seeing the highest-quality representations of the famous artists we know, we also see the work of remarkable artists who we've never heard of before."
Among that list of under-recognized artists are several women, such as the Austrian-born Erika Giovanna Klien, creator of wonderfully dynamic geometric abstractions, and the Russian cubist fernand influenced painter Nadezhda Udaltsova.
For Nashvillians who've been following the ongoing saga of Fisk University's Stieglitz Collection, the Société Anonyme exhibit also represents an opportunity to see work by some of the same artists included in that collection, among them Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin. It should be noted that there are considerable differences between these two groupings of art, but they are united by a common impulse, as Scala points out.
"Each of these collections was conceived and donated to a university as a way of giving an audience insight into modern art and its relationship with modern life."
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