From Europe to America. From Paris to New York.
That’s what happened in the Thirties – from the beginning of the decade, when the reactionary regimes shattered the fragile continental democracies or squelched the freedoms that the arts demanded from the newborn ‘sixth part of the world’, the Russia of the soviets.
Where did the artists take their experiences of those years? What was the landing place of that emigration of the arts uprooted by totalitarianism? The United States – and in particular that incredible multiethnic enclave known as New York. From Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Martin Gropius, from Josef Albers to Piet Mondrian. The ‘new frontier’ opened by the epoch-making 1913 Armory Show, already crossed by Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí, now stood as the great theatre in which the experiences of modernism in art could find an audience and worldwide resonance.
In 1942, Peggy Guggenheim opened her Art of This Century gallery/museum; following his work in Paris alongside René Drouin, Leo Krausz (Leo Castelli), was busy searching out the young talents who crowded the Big Apple – and opened his gallery in 1957.
The New York School was blooming tumultuously in the late Forties, bringing into its corolla the proponents of the sign and the pictorial gesture – the action painters – as well as those who preferred large expanses of color, the color field painters. In 1950, the “Irascibles” – as they were disparagingly dubbed by the Herald Tribune – vigorously disputed the exhibition project presented by the Metropolitan Museum. Among them, besides Barnett Newman, were Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, James Brooks, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Clifford Still, and Arshile Gorky: the heart of that abstract expressionism that was searching for an original balance between the vigor of the sign and the “sublime,” between abstraction and inner vision.
And in 1953, Martha Jackson, a Buffalo native, opened her gallery in New York. In the space of a decade, she attracted a constellation of premier artists: from Jim Dine to Sam Francis, from Adolph Gottlieb to Willem De Kooning, from Claes Oldenburg to Christo, from Paul Jenkins to Norman Bluhm, from James Brooks to Hans Hofmann.
If, as she herself said, “an art dealer [was someone] whose primary role was that of a mediator between the artist and society.” we ought not to be surprised by her interest in one of the most radical and irreverent art experiences, that of the Japanese Gutai group. Thus, although Paul Jenkins was first introduced to Gutai in 1957 in Paris through Michel Tapié, he, as well as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were able to experience works by Shozo Shimamoto, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Akira Kanayama, and Sadamasa Motonaga in the 1958 landmark exhibition of Gutai at the Martha Jackson Gallery.
Galleria Open Art brings together a carefully selected lineup of artists from the Martha Jackson Gallery - Paul Jenkins, Sam Francis, James Brooks, Fritz Bultman, Norman Bluhm, and Michael Goldberg – to which it flanks other eminent exponents of American abstract expressionism - John Ferren, John Grillo, and Conrad Marca-Relli – and one of the foremost champions, together with Louise Nevelson, of American sculpture in the feminine: Beverly Pepper. The works on show all boast outstanding provenances and bibliographies, and go a long way toward recreating the exciting, effervescent climate of the New York of the mid-20th century. For not a few of the works, it is the first time they have shared gallery walls since then, making this exhibition an extraordinary tribute to an era – but also and above all a fascinating opportunity for in-depth study of a unique period in the history of art.
