Legacies for Iowa

Legacies for Iowa, a University of Iowa Museum of Art Collections Sharing Project, features some of the most important paintings in the UIMA collection. The exhibition explores each painting's distinctive qualities, revealing each work as remarkable in its own right, while also suggesting how the objects and their makers interrelate to create a tapestry of complex and fascinating stories.

The scope of the exhibition spans seventy years of Modern Art, from Lyonel Feininger's 1909 A Street in Paris to Philip Guston's 1979 Ramp. Paintings by Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky, among others, showcase hallmarks of European Modernism, while wartime works by Max Beckmann, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Marsden Hartley tap into the intensely humanistic feelings and internationalism of the period.

Artists continually break the rules—even if the rules were once revolutionary (as was the case with Pollock). Appropriately, one of the last innovations presented in Legacies for Iowa is Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1960-1961). The canvas, with its subtle variations in color, represents the artist's reaction against the Abstract Expressionist movement and earlier painters' integration of autobiography in their work; Reinhardt aimed to negate expression and the presence of the artist with his art.

Each of the paintings in the exhibition is an iconic example of visual experimentation, innovation, reformation, and transformation—all themes that reside at the heart of the UIMA's remarkable collections.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website