YUAG Exhibit Complicates The Midcentury Modern Story

It’s only the form of it, the broad bands of color, that might give away that the painting above is by Mark Rothko, famous for his much more abstract work. The faces, the shapes of waves, of limbs, the fact that there are lines at all, aren’t Rothko’s style at all — or at least not the style we know him for. It’s all too tempting to map the general narrative of art history in the 20th century, from representational to abstract art, onto Rothko’s own personal history. In that context, we might think this is a painting Rothko made early in his life, before he discovered abstraction. We’d be wrong — he made it a year before he died. We think of Rothko and his contemporaries as abstract painters, but they were more than that. The story is more complicated.

These and other revelations are part of ​“Midcentury Abstraction: A Closer Look,” an exhibit running now at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 26 that ​“highlights the breadth and variety of practices in abstract art that took place around the middle of the 20th century,” as an accompanying text relates. ​“Eschewing the notion that there was a linear shift toward abstraction at midcentury, the exhibition showcases a group of artists who freely moved in and out of abstraction or blended their radical approaches with traditional subject matter, such as landscape, portraiture, or still life.”

The show — organized by Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Keely Orgeman, and Gregor Quack — came about when YUAG received a gift from the Friday Foundation, including works by celebrated midcentury artists Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. Both are famous for their abstract paintings, but the pieces in the gift showed that both artists did both abstract and representational works throughout their careers. Kline and Rothko, in other words, didn’t so much move away from representational art and into abstraction, as a cursory glance would suggest; rather, they broadened their artistic visions to encompass both. The art market and art critics at the time may have decided that representational works were old-fashioned and that the future lay in further abstraction, but the artists themselves didn’t.

The museum first staged a small exhibit of Kline and Rothko, but ​“during the time we worked on the show,” Quack says in an accompanying video, ​“we noticed a few things, a few ideas that we felt could be explored more.” It also ​“made us remember that a truly important gift never just expands a collection,” but ​“prompts us to newly appreciate what’s already there.” In this case, it made the curators look at work in Yale’s collection that ​“art history may have bypassed, either because their work fell out of some trends, or because they were marginalized in a field in which a few loud, White men hogged a lot of mainstream attention. So interestingly,” Quack concludes, ​“a gift of work by two canonical male artists has actually prompted us to refocus on work by artists of color, women artists, or artists with really complex life stories of migration.” The current show thus includes artists Lee Bontecou, Dorothy Dehner, Willem de Kooning, George Miyasaki, and others. 

“Collectively, these works present midcentury abstraction as a dynamic process of exploration pursued by artists who were unafraid to break the boundaries of genre, medium, or style,” the accompanying note relates. Or as Quack says, ​“the basic idea we want to convey with ​‘Closer Look’ is that abstraction was not, in fact, a sudden revelation arrived at by some lone genius, but in fact a gradual and sometimes even ponderous group effort. There’s not just one ​‘why’ for abstraction, there are many. It came to different people for many different reasons at different times,” and ​“those differences are worth thinking about and studying.” In a move that ties the show to our own times, he points out that many of the artists ​“made their work after having witnessed, and sometimes having narrowly escaped, devastating war, persecution, and other injustices. They often chose to pursue the art that we see today not in spite of that experience, but precisely because of it.” The abstraction let the artists confront their circumstances, and perhaps wring something like hope from it.

The point that abstract artists, in fact, moved between modes of painting is amply illustrated, not only by the Rothko. There’s also a painting by Jackson Pollock of a scene from Martha’s Vineyard that, the accompanying note relates, he did before he actually did reject realism for his much more famous abstract work.

Even more interesting are the inclusion of photographs by Aaron Siskind that complicate the basic idea that abstract painters were moving away from the realism photographs could provide. Painters and photographers could move in the same direction. Siskind was friends with both Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and ​“there is evidence that both painters took inspiration from Siskind’s rough surfaces to change their own brushwork,” an accompanying note reveals. Siskind started his career as a documentarian but ​“by the 1940s … he had begun focusing his camera on minute details in the city, photographing dilapidated walls to show the cracks and flaking paint as abstract textures and surfaces. In this way, Siskind hoped to create photographs that could stand on their own, regardless of the social context from which they originated.”

Through the experiences of individual artists, the exhibit also touches on the way various kinds of abstractions can be understood as reactions to life in the 20th century, though not always in the ways that one might expect. Hedda Sterne, born in 1910 in Romania, ​“was deeply influenced by Surrealism and interacted with many of the movement’s protagonists in Paris,” an accompanying note reads. ​“In 1941, she narrowly escaped death in the Bucharest pogrom and fled to the United States. While she quickly connected with members of the New York School, her experience of the city was both overwhelming and exhilirating. ​‘When I came to the United States,’ Sterne later remembered, ​‘I was struck that this country was more surrealistic than anything anybody imagined.’ ” In 1953, she used spray paint — then a very recent invention — to create Tondo and ​“convey the sense of speed and motion of modern American life.” Perhaps, too, the whirlwind of events that had brought her to it.

The exhibit also contains a lesson in the friction between what the artist intends and what the audience sees, a friction that can increase as the work grows more abstract. The accompanying note relates that artist Alberto Burri was a doctor in the Italian army during World War II. When he ditched medicine for art, he turned to burlap ​“as his principal medium” and used ​“a blowtorch as a paintbrush.” After charring burlap and paper, he used varnish to put everything togther. ​“Although Burri consistently denied it, there is a strong sense of postwar trauma in his work, as well as a physician’s sensibility. He always counteracted a ruin with a healing — stitching a ripped body, cauterizing burnt wounds.” Is that right? Is the artist right? A generation ago, artists’ interpretations of their own work mattered far less than they do now. With the resurgence of the artist as a prime commentator on their own work and what it means, maybe Burri’s protestations carry more weight than they once did.

Less in doubt are the intentions of artist Hannelore Baron, who ​“drew upon her experiences as a Holocaust survivor of Kristallnacht,” an accompanying note reads. ​“She fled to the United States with her family in 1941, when she was in her teens. She didn’t start making art until many years later, when she was in her 40s. ​“She incorporated found fabrics, often rough in texture and stained, that she tore and restitched. She frequently added unintelligible pictographs and numbers in sharp pen and ink that bled into the surface of the paper on fabric — marks reminiscent of concentration camp tattoos.” The note offers a few words Baron said of her own work: ​“The writing … represents all the words that have been written to tell the unimaginable and explain the unexplainable.”

“Midcentury Abstraction: A Closer Look” runs at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through June 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information. Admission is free.