Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
A Century of Modern Art
Auckland Art Gallery
June 7 – September 28
John Daly-Peoples
A Century of Modern Art which has just opened at the Auckland Art Gallery is one of the most significant exhibitions mounted by the gallery in the last few years. It is on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, and provides a survey of the major artists who transformed modern art from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century.
The exhibition features 57 works by 53 artists, including Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Helen Frankenthaler, Édouard Manet, William Merritt Chase, Amedeo Modigliani, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, James McNeill Whistler, among others.
The Toledo Art Museum was established and funded by Edward Drummond Libby and still has a substantial Endowment Trust in his name . The endowment has some $330 million and a budget of more than $20 million a year,. Many of the works in the exhibition were gifted by Libby or acquired through the Libbey Endowment.
Some of the Impressionist / Post Impressionist works by artists such as Renoir, van Gogh, Morisot and Gauguin are major works whle some of them are of unfamiliar subjects such as Renoir’s ”Road at Wargemont”
Several of the works are excellent examples of their work such as van Gogh’s “Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers” and Monet’s Water Lilies of 1922, one of the many images of the flower he created in his later years.
The show also features some unfamiliar names of American artists such as Luther Emerson van Gorder whose “Flower Market, Paris” (late 19ht century) could be mistaken for a Pissarro.
The small Whistler work ”Crepuscule in Opal, Trouville” of 1865 is an interesting inclusion in the show, the landscape with its slash of colour is an almost abstract work
Among the more contemporary work is Helen Frankenthaler “Blue Jay” painted at a transition time between paintings of organic forms and colour field paintings. There is also a Morris Louis whose work has not been seen in Auckland since his large exhibition at the gallery in 1971
There are also works by artists who we rarely see but whose work shows high level of sophistication such as Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, and Gray”, László Moholy-Nagy’s ”Am2”, and Max Beckmann’s “The Trapeze”.
There are a few important American artists as Stanton Macdonald-Wright who was one of the early American abstract artists and his “Synchromy, Blue-Green”, of 1916 is an example of the abstraction which developed in America in the early twentieth century.
Other American artists in the show include Gertrude Glass Green who was an important constructivist artist and Grace Hartigan who was a member of the New York School in the 1950’s and 60’s.
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