Florida Institute of Technology’s Foosaner Art Museum wants to remind us that modern American art is not always made in New York City. In fact, it might not come with a “made in USA” label.
Originating from the University of Miami’s Lowe Museum of Art, “Pan American Modernism: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America and the United States” tries, with 75 works from throughout the Americas, to sum up a vast, fruitful and politically knotty 60 years – 1919 to 1979 – in art history.
The exhibition’s curator, Dr. Nathan J. Timpano, is assistant professor of art history at the University of Miami. He selected the show from works in the Lowe’s permanent collection, and then divided them into five themes, each of which has been designated its own area in the Foosaner’s linked main galleries.
The themes range from period-specific Mexican muralism and modernist photography to the timeless subject of the female muse. One grouping asks whether abstract expressionism is a Pan American language; another looks at the legacy of geometric abstraction, including constructivist art, minimalism and op art.
That’s a lot to cover in one show. While the objects on display speak eloquently for themselves, they do not always address the show’s subcategories and may end up confusing rather than educating visitors about the artists, ideas and cultural importance of the objects they contain.
In his opening-day lecture at the Foosaner April 29, Timpano confessed that the exhibition has some shortcomings.
First mounted in 2013 at the Lowe, the show coincided with the 500th anniversary of Ponce de León’s arrival in Florida.
Timpano was charged with organizing the exhibition exclusively from the Lowe’s permanent collection. It was to include art from all the Americas: North, Central and South.
“That was a tricky directive for me, because as a curator you always try to find the best and the strongest pieces,” Timpano said. He was not permitted to flesh out the show with loans from collectors or other museums.
Because the Lowe has not collected art from all the countries in the Americas, works by important artists in, say, Bolivia, were absent.
The Lowe’s collection does contain examples of 20th century Canadian art. Timpano did not include it though, because Canadian artists “were not engaging in this time period with modernism in the way that the U.S. and Latin American countries were.”
So much for Pan Americanism.
When the show focuses on a simple, broad idea, the themed artworks play well with each other, keeping the viewer busy moving between them to compare what each has to say about the topic. The female muse section succeeds in this way.
Whatever your ideological leanings, the fact remains that Woman, portrayed as chaste saint or carefree sinner, bountiful goddess or cruel mistress, has been a subject of the male artistic gaze for millennia. The 18 small works by 12 men and two women in this section speak eloquently to that idea.
Among the goddesses portrayed here are two oils on canvas of women by men. One, a classically draped woman seated amidst fruit and flowers, is by the Cuban Eduardo Abela. Another, “Mulata,” is a well-endowed earth spirt made manifest by Carlos Enríquez, also from Cuba.
A work by the German-born Colombian artist Guillermo Wiedemann adds a melancholy note to the subject. A nod to Picasso is evident in Wiedemann’s untitled watercolor of a torso-length figure costumed for Carnival. Painted in 1948, the androgynous figure has the world-weary expression and skin coloration of Picasso’s Blue Period from nearly a half century earlier. Wiedemann later became known for his figural abstract paintings, a watercolor example of which also hangs in this section.
Three ink-on-paper drawings by still another Cuban, Wilfredo Lam, demonstrate the power of woman in Lam’s surreal, Santeria-inflected worldview.
His “Portrait of Helena” from 1941 is an homage to his real-life muse (and second wife) Helena Holzer. The elegant line drawing depicts a nude holding an oil lamp. The text label accompanying this work (researched, as were all of the texts in the show, by Timpano’s art history students) suggests that the years of the couple’s marriage (1939-1950) “correspond with the development of [Lam’s] most significant artistic period.”
The weakest theme in the show is “Mexican Muralism and its Legacy.” It includes one work on paper each from Los Tres Grandes of the movement. José Clemente Orozco is represented by an etching after the tortured figure at the center of his tremendous “Prometheus” mural at Pomona College. Diego Rivera’s immense talent is ill-served by the postcard-sized landscape drawing (presumable a preparatory sketch for a mural) that represents him. David Alfaro Siqueiros is represented by his 1968 color lithograph of a scourged and bleeding Christ.
The other Mexicans in the section, Rufino Tamayo and Carlos Mérida, are represented by figural abstractions based respectively on European cubism and indigenous folk life. Both artists are about as far removed from Mexican Muralism’s white-hot sociopolitical ideology as an artist can get. Mérida’s mesmerizing oil-mixed-with-sand painting (“Abstract with three figures” of 1961) hearkens back to Picasso’s use of that textural medium in the 1930s. Tamayo’s 1969 lithograph “Dos cabezas” is a side-by-side depiction of two females from Tamayo’s stock of schematically-drawn characters.
The section called Abstract Expressionism and Its Legacy features 20 paintings and mixed media works, all of them strong and some of them imposing in scale. Prepare to be wowed by the Central and South Americans here. Argentinian Vicente Forte’s darkly poetic “Pájaro libre” (“Free Bird”) from 1962 will put you in mind of Poe, and Puerto Rican-born Olga Albizu’s oil painting “Crecimento” (“Growth”), circa 1960, is lusciously chewy; its thick, spatula-applied amber, orange, black and white squares stick to one another like soft taffy.
The section is not exclusively devoted to Abstract Expressionism; Fernando Botero’s wonderful, gargantuan 1962 still life “Las Frutas” is a case in point. Those that are part of that movement include paintings by artists associated with Cuba’s “Los Once” (The Eleven): Hugo Consuegra, Raúl Milián and Antonio Vidal. Their art works give credence to the Idea that the 1950’s art movement was fluently bilingual.
Representing the U.S., Adolph Gottlieb’s “New York Night Scene,” a small but excellent 1942 oil painting, represents the earlier half of that artist’s influential career, and Hans Hofmann’s “Nightfall” of 1958 (an even smaller oil) is a good example of Hofmann’s all-or-nothing style.
Pan American Modernism: Avant Garde Art in Latin America and the United States continues through July 29. The Foosaner is in Melbourne’s Eau Gallie arts district, at 1463 Highland Ave.