Park Avenue Cubists
In looking at the work from the 1930s and 40s in this group show, it's surprising how tame they appear to us now remembering how shocking they were when they first appeared. Which is not to say that they're passé. The cubist style of the small group displayed here is more familiar to us from Picasso and Braque but those two weren't the only painters making good paintings in the cubist style. The American artists included here, who called themselves the Park Avenue Cubists (Albert Gallatin, Charles Shaw, George L.K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen), weren't doing anything that hadn't already been done in Europe but they can be credited with spreading and attempting to popularize the breakup of the picture frame to America and making some fine paintings in the process that are still delightful to look at.
This well-to-do group was focused around Albert Gallatin's Museum of Living Art at New York University (where the Grey Art Gallery is now) which gave Americans the chance, after the 1913 Armory Show, to witness more of the strange new maturity painting had achieved in Europe and to follow its developments. Mondrian, Braque, Picasso, and Moholy-Nagy, among others, were shown there.
George L.K. Morris's painting, Indians Hunting (1932), makes use of the collage effect depicting a scene of two Indians in a bark canoe. Pieces of actual bar are used to make the canoe while blocks of solid blue and green paint compose the water, forest and sky. The Indians' multi-colored feather headdresses repeat as a colorful motif in the sky while raincloud puffs and stones share the same shades of gray and black and dabs of orange swim below the canoe. All the forms are reduced to their geometric equivalents in this folk-like rendering.
Suzy Frelinghuysen's Still Life, is a collage and oil painting that, in its debt to France, even goes so far as to use materials with French writing on them but the treatment of the vase shapes which are echoed in shadow colors drawing us back into the picture plane and the use of an ochre color that appears in the background then comes through into the foreground, creates an off-beat sense of dimension that much other Cubist work fails to accomplish.
The b-level, financially, of the American Abstract Artists are displayed upstairs at the gallery. This gorgeous little show includes paintings by Ilya Bolotowsky, Alice Trumbull Mason, David Smith and Stuart Davis from the same period and shows the explosion of energy these Americans had picked up from Europe and begun to interpret and develop there.
Alice Turnbull Mason's pure abstractions are more than a relief to see of art from this time. These "non-objective" compositions are a feast to look at. A collage sense of fragments used for their peculiar sensory properties are juxtaposed with primordial shapes and fields of mixed colors, lines and textile patterns. They are filled with ideas given visual shape—ideas that only borrow from the physical, being more involved in creating what's never been seen before. She changes color for compositional purposes, something she learned to do from Gorky who she studied with for a few years.
Stuart Davis can never be written up enough. The two lithographs shown here are also collage-like inventions but he uses more from the physical world, though filtered through dreams. In Sixth Avenue L (1931), impressions and details of a walk down the avenue are recalled but jumbled to new arrangements. A light shade in black, sticking out of a curtain, is highlighted against a floating window pane with a star of David (and also his signature), while a sidewalk gum machine and views into sewing shops share the same arrangement with a mask, rooftops and the Hebrew letters of a store sign that inform: kosher. We're given a new sense of what we've always seen by this new arrangement of the ordinary.
In Shape of Landscape Space (1939), he is further away from the representational but a village scene is still evoked with the use of thick lines that form skeletal shapes that precede the arrangement of lines David Smith would eventually use in his metal sculpture. It's interesting to see this work in the same show as two early David Smith paintings (both from 1934) that seem to be preliminary versions of sculpture pieces he would make of the bold heavy object/portraits he here gives first visual birth to.
(Arts, November 1985)