OPENING SOON
Modern and Contemporary
Art from the Collection
by Will South, chief curator
“Speech after long silence; it is right.” So
wrote poet William Butler Yeats, and after
an extended period of silence in the vault,
selections from the CMA’s modern and
contemporary art speak again.
Just as the museum has selections
from its marvelous Kress Collection of
Renaissance art on view all the time, and
just as the best of our early American has
its rightful place, so, too, should art of
our own time be readily available to our
growing membership with its multiplicity
of interests. In two main galleries on
the CMA’s ?rst ?oor, over 30 paintings,
drawings, photographs and sculpture
will make their way onto the walls in
late August, and will remain on view
inde?nitely.
With abstract art, a lot of people feel lost.
It is hopeless, they feel, to get any meaning
from looking at a painting of nothing
but big swaths of paint. And, we often
feel uncomfortable in front of abstract art
because we feel we should “get it,” and
when we don’t, frustration sets in. No
one likes to feel intimidated or left out. A
typical reaction is to get defensive and say:
“My four-year-old could paint that.” By
dismissing abstract art, both the challenges
and the rewards of learning to appreciate it
are likewise missed.
If you think of abstract art as some kind of
foreign language, then one way to approach
it is to think of it another way. We all know
music (not songs with lyrics, but just music
with no human voices), and most of us
love it. The thunderous orchestration of
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a Beethoven symphony overwhelms us; a
gentle Spanish guitar piece can make us
shut our eyes and dream; a lone violin can
make us cry.
Let us remember: musical notes do not
look like anything at all. They do not
replicate any natural phenomena. We know
music moves us emotionally—it can thrill
us—and we do not dismiss it, we do not
fear it, we do not mock it. Perhaps if we
approach some abstract painting as the
orchestration of color, we might think
differently about it.
Among the earliest works of art on view
in Modern & Contemporary Art from
the Collection is Leon Kelly’s energetic
abstraction in?uenced by the then-new and
radical art movement, Cubism. Kelly’s early
embrace of Cubism was shared by a small
but enthusiastic number of Americans who
were excited about the possibilities opened
up by Cubism: objects are always viewed
and understood from different angles and
over time, so why not include time and
space in image-making? Thinking in this
way resulted in canvases that were at ?rst
baf?ing to the public; they showed a ?at
surface fractured into spaces that analyzed
objects with movement and changeability
in mind. Kelly’s work is a classic American
response to one of the most important
art movements ever, and a good starting
place to either revisit Cubism, or begin to
appreciate it for the ?rst time.
In the same gallery as the small and
dark, but powerful, Leon Kelly, is the
dramatically large and brightly colored
Gene Davis. While early abstraction
usually involved a ?gure or a still life as