July 16–23, 1998

art

Driven To Abstraction

Three interesting stops on the modernism trail.

by Robin Rice

Morgan Russell: The Origins of a Modern Masterpiece

through Aug. 23

Robert Motherwell's Graphics, II

through Aug. 16

Darwin Nix

Morris Gallery, through Sept. 13

All three shows at the Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St., 972.7600

AUTOMATISM FOR THE PEOPLE: Motherwell's Lyric Suite (1965), black ink with orange bleed and blue ink.

In a well-balanced counterpoint to its ongoing exhibition of mostly 18th- and 19th-century work from its permanent collection, the Museum of American Art has mounted three smallish but distinctive shows illuminating key features of modernism.

In the early decades of the century, Morgan Russell was one of the few Americans to make the bold transition from representation to abstraction. At mid-century Robert Motherwell was one of the central Abstract Expressionists. No doubt the contemporary paintings of Philadelphian Darwin Nix are postmodern, but they are postmodern in the sense that they elaborate on the modernist tradition.

Modernism in two-dimensional art was characterized by a drive toward simplification, color emphasis and increasing abstraction. Pigment on a surface became the definition of painting (and also printmaking, in the case of Motherwell).

That journey began in the 19th century. By the opening of this century, artists had clear ideas about using color to define form. In 1912 Morgan Russell wrote in his notebook, "Make lines—colors—never paint 'the thing' or the subject. Paint the Emotion—not illustration." Working in Paris, Americans Russell and his colleague Stanton Macdonald-Wright developed a school of color (chroma)-based painting called Synchromism. It is a synthesis of the faceted forms of cubism with prismatic color.

The PAFA show centers on a single painting and includes studies for it, as well as stylistically related works by other American artists. Russell's Synchromy in Blue-Violet appears to be completely abstract, composed of angular shapes of brilliant primary (red, yellow and blue) and secondary (green, orange and violet) color and occasional intermediate colors like blue-violet. No unenlightened viewer could possibly guess that Russell's composition is derived from Michelangelo's Dying Slave. The museum's show is enhanced by the almost shocking presence of a plaster cast of the Michelangelo sculpture. Its huge scale and human fleshy presence oppose the flat planes of early modernism, just as its grubby school-worn surface contrasts with the paintings' fresh colors.

Casts like this were once the mainstay of art training, but the practice of drawing or modeling from casts fell from fashion as abstraction came to the fore. There's irony in the fact that Russell's painting helped to destroy the currency of its subject. Casts of old sculpture are rare and valuable today. They are no longer made.

A line has been crudely incised down the center of forehead and nose of the plaster Slave, dividing the face and marking the axis of its slant. No doubt this mark was made by some student or teacher intent on reproducing that angle in a study.

The thought behind that line is echoed in Russell's drawings of the sculpture. Straight lines extending beyond the contours of the form suggest that he is familiar with the drawing method of triangulation. The location of a point in the subject can be determined by extending lines in the model which cross at that point. When you see an artist sighting with a pencil and then making a long straight mark, triangulation is probably the method she is using.

These superimposed lines are abstractions extending beyond the form. The contraposto stance of the Slave contrasts the angles of shoulders and hips, opposing lines which, if extended, cross, producing a triangle. The structure of straight lines is imposed on the subject with the intention of rendering it accurately; however, Russell seems to have transformed the system into the subject of the painting—an intellectual and pictorial abstraction. Russell studied with Matisse, who analyzed the body in terms of essential forms. Influenced by Matisse and Monet, he painted still life subjects depicting form in artificial bands of warm and cool color. Synchromy in Blue-Violet and a few related works successfully unite his interest in color and form. This small exhibition is fascinating, though slightly hermetic.

 

SIMPLICITY: Nix's Social Grapes (1994), oil on canvas.

Andre Breton called the products of automatism—writing or drawing without preconceived intention—"an infinitely precious substance." The graphic works of Robert Motherwell are automatism at its best. Motherwell's prints and drawings share Russell's joy in color, but are simultaneously less deliberate and more formal, though that may seem like a contradiction. Motherwell, influenced by the surrealists and the pervasive mid-century dedication to Zen non-intentionality, incorporated isolated fat sweeping brushstrokes in marvelously fluid calligraphy, each spatter and swerve so right and so "accidental."

The works, dating from the mid '60s to the early '80s, become increasingly severe, though rarely graceless. The Rite of Passage series ('79-'80) has a sign-like postmodern feeling, though it is followed by lush gestural pieces with color-referencing titles like The Redness of Red which combines silkscreen and lithograph with collage in an elegant composition.

Darwin Nix's Heartbreaker is also a red-on-red composition which reveals the power of this most vital of colors. Nix's rather minimal work carries the modernist obsession with paint on canvas to an almost absurd excess. All the works he is showing in the Morris Gallery of the Museum of American Art are traditional flat vertical rectangles. The sole and ubiquitous "image" is an ovoid placed above center and surrounded with oblong splotches, as petals surround the eye of a daisy. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Nix rings a lot of changes on this theme with different color combinations and paint which is applied in a variety of mostly thick and slathery ways. Manipulating the figure/ground relationship and scale, Nix evokes all sorts of metaphors with his elementary formal composition. The roundish image can seem sun-like, radiating rays; wound-like and spouting blood; or head-like. In Homicide a shiny black circle floats on a matte olive green surround. It, in turn, is surrounded by thick white globs. Nix's paint often seems to be trowelled on or squeezed directly from the tube, where it develops a wrinkled deflated-looking skin. Other areas may reveal broad brushwork in a monochrome field. The bright yellow-on-yellow center of Octopus seems almost mushy and disturbingly penetrable. The fall of light on Black Moria II glitters on a glossy licorice-black center and reveals a dull and funereal satin sheen on the surrounding surface. Orbiting white, black and dark red blobs are formed in low relief. Nix's work hints at the boundaries of a particular exercise in the possibilities of painting. You can't do much more with much less.