AFA Summer 2018

Summer 98 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Seeing Takes Time American Modernism at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Arthur Garfield Dove (1880–1946) Chinese Music, 1923 Oil and metallic paint on panel, 2111⁄16 x 18⅛ inches Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Alfred Stieglitz Collection (1949-18-2) “How hazardous it is to jump to the conclusion that what we don’t understand has no meaning.” Critic Arthur Jerome Eddy wrote this sentiment in a 1914 essay comparing the shock of some modern art to the unfamiliar sounds of Chinese music, which may have inspired this painting’s title. Dove appears to have taken this public defense of abstract art as the point of departure for a dynamic composition. The subjective association of sound and color, known as synesthesia, was popular within the Stieglitz circle. Although parts of the composition look like industrial buildings and circular saw blades, Dove intended these shapes to convey intangible rhythms and forces from the world around him; this painting used a pictorial vocabulary of abstract form that would sustain the artist over the next two decades. The picture was one of only three works by Dove that Stieglitz chose to be included in the Société Anonyme’s landmark International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. T he first half of the twentieth century was filled with unprecedented social, technological, and cultural upheaval. Against this backdrop of change, traditional forms of artistic representation seemed inadequate. Many artists here and abroad pushed their work in new directions, embracing the revolutionary visual language of abstraction, while continuing to refer to the world around them. Bound to the past while heading into the future, they created what now is called Modernism. In the early 1900s, Modernism was more than a movement or a style. It was a feeling, an outlook and, for some, a way of life influencing everything from fashion to politics. The exhibition Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 focuses on work from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by artists who grappled during this period with what it meant to be Modern and what it was to be American. Some of these artists were born in the United States. Others were immigrants who became citizens. As a group, they made work in styles and of subjects as varied as they were. This pluralism was one of the hallmarks of Modernism in America. Because aesthetic strategies varied across the movement, the exhibition unfolds thematically in order to allow for aesthetic resonances and comparisons. by Jessica Smith