March 11 through August 14, 2011
Best known for his abstract mobiles and stabiles, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was also a prolific portraitist. Throughout his career Calder portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as colleagues Marion Greenwood, Fernand Léger, and Saul Steinberg, to name a few.
Typically, Calder worked in the unorthodox medium of wire, a flexible linear material, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance. Suspended from the wall or ceiling, the portraits are free to move; because of this mobility, they seem—like their subjects—to have a life of their own. This unprecedented exhibition will feature Calder’s work alongside contemporary documents—photographs, drawings, and especially caricatures by such artist-illustrators as Paolo Garretto, Miguel Covarrubias, and Paul Colin—and will pose questions regarding the line between fine-art portraiture and caricature. The exhibition will also shed light on an often overlooked aspect of Alexander Calder’s career, as well as on broader narratives of American culture of the twentieth century.
Barbara Zabel is the guest curator for this exhibition.
1st floor West, American Art Museum
March 11, 2011- September 5, 2011
During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created precise yet eerie pictures—works of art that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in America in those years. The beautiful geometries of Ault’s paintings make personal worlds of clarity and composure to offset a real world he felt was in crisis.
“Historians have recorded the heroic accomplishments and sacrifices of the Second World War,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “But what were our families at home really thinking and feeling during those times? This exhibition and book delve below the surface of 47 paintings to understand deep emotional currents that help us understand those feelings. With exquisite precision—just like the precise art of featured painter George Ault—Alex Nemerov creates anew this world for all of us.”
This is the first major exhibition of Ault’s work in more than 20 years and includes 47 paintings and drawings by Ault and his contemporaries. It centers on five paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell’s Corners in Woodstock, N.Y. The mystery in Ault’s series of nocturnes captures the anxious tenor of life on the home front.
“It was this quality of darkened and haunted mystery—a lonely junction at night—that made me think Ault’s pictures spoke to their times,” said Nemerov. “Even so, Ault is not an obvious choice to anoint as the centerpiece of a show subtitled ‘1940s America.’ But viewed in retrospect, Ault’s isolation gave him a chance to speak broadly—to address the sorrow and moody loneliness others felt then too.”
Ault and the other 22 painters in the exhibition worked in isolated communities far from the war-time turmoil of the cities. Yet they confronted the chaos and devastating uncertainty of the times through their paintings. Ault shows the intimate corners of his world, rendered with obsessive clarity and impeccable control that suggest a counterbalance to civilization at the brink during the war years. The exhibition includes artists as celebrated as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, while others such as Edward Biberman and Dede Plummer are scarcely known to today’s art audiences. Taken together, their artworks reveal an aesthetic vein running through 1940s American art that has not been identified previously.
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