Wichita Art Museum exhibit examines art and culture at time of change

Today, we might think of them as rock stars of the art world, but the artists featured in the Wichita Art Museum’s traveling exhibit, “American Moderns, 1910-1960: From Georgia O’Keeffe to Norman Rockwell,” were a bit of “renegades” in their times.

The artists scrapped standard traditions and experimented with new styles during those turbulent times. “With a change in culture, and with new industries and urbanization, the artists wanted to reflect the world around them,” said Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum.

The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 4, includes 57 works from 40 artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Elie Nadelman and Norman Rockwell. The works reflect 50 years of sometimes painful transformations in American culture: the Great Depression, two world wars, mass-migrations and advances in technology. The works are organized into six themes – Cubist experiments, Still Life, landscapes, cityscapes, portraits and Americana – that trace these cultural shifts.

Some of the works were not initially well-received. “Change can be hard,” McDonnell said. “When the general public has a conception of what art should look like, it takes a while for the public to evolve with that change.”

Georgia O’Keeffe’s “2 Yellow Leaves (Yellow Leaves)” (1928) was initially rejected for not depicting what a leaf looks like in reality, but now the painting is widely-praised for O’Keeffe’s technique in representation of form and color.

“It was very avant garde when it first appeared. The general public in the 1920s ... expected academic, representational scenes or narratives,” McDonnell said. “Georgia O’Keeffe taps into the American transcendentalism movement of the time with ‘2 Yellow Leaves,’ where nature is the source of divine.”

The exhibit, which includes 53 paintings and four sculptures, is from New York’s Brooklyn Museum, where many modernist pieces reside in private collections. “They have many people that donate their collections. These are the gems of their museum. The curator handpicked these to give a clear sense of the full spectrum of artists in the 20th century, but a lot of the cultural shifts happened right there in Brooklyn. Many of the cityscapes are of Brooklyn. The curators really let their hometown shine.”

Francis Criss’ “City Landscape” (1934) is a hyper-Precisionist depiction of Brooklyn – every line is crisp. Criss slips in social commentary on the Depression-era economy, by placing “For Sale” and “For Rent” signs against the word “Trust” emblazoned on the front of a bank.

“Criss is binary to a school of nature, a portrayal of the changing dynamic in modern cities,” said McDonnell. “Modernists were about having a unique and independent voice. Academic painters sit within a certain historical mode, so these artists looked at either land or city and found their own voices within those settings.”

The Moderns offer more variety in terms of style and form for viewers because of the tumultuous time period the show covers. “There’s really something for everyone,” said Lisa Volpe, curator at the Wichita Art Museum, who is overseeing the installation. “There was no single style of aesthetic, there’s a variety of styles and approaches. It does a really wonderful job of showing these different styles yet bringing them together.”

Whether you’re art novice or connoisseur, there’s something new to be discovered at the exhibit.

“One thing true about a powerful work of art is that you see something you’ve never seen before each time. I think all ranges of artistic awareness will be impressed by both the caliber of the work and the dynamism of the early 20th century,” McDonnell said. “There’s nothing like standing in front of the real thing.”

This story was originally published October 2, 2014 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Wichita Art Museum exhibit examines art and culture at time of change."