Collection Spotlight: American Modern

American Modern broadly explores how artists of the first half of the 20th century, including artists based in the US Southwest and a significant cohort of women artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Marguerite Zorach, used abstraction and experimentation to spark new perceptions of modernity and novel modes of expression.​

During the first half of the 20th century, visual artists, writers, musicians, and other cultural figures committed themselves to shedding Victorian sensibilities and embracing an exciting new modernity. Many of these American modernists flocked to New York City, where they discovered communities of kindred spirits that shared a propensity for experimentation and abstraction.​

In 1913, several artists, including Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, organized the Armory Show, the first large-scale introduction of modern art presented to North American audiences. The exhibition shocked and awed, ushering in a period of American modernism that sparked new perceptions of beauty, novel modes of expression, and alternative ways of thinking and talking about the visual arts.​

American Modern highlights PhxArt’s exceptional holdings by American modernists in the Museum’s collection. The exhibition celebrates five key areas and groups across the larger timeline of the period, including the first generation of modernist artists in America and Europe, the avant-garde in the Southwest, the Transcendental Painting Group, the American Abstract Artists group, and the significant cohort of women artists who worked across these four areas and collectives. Featured works include paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by well-known artists such as Davis, Kuhn, Abraham Walkowitz, Joseph Stella, Alexander Archipenko, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Oscar Bluemner, Max Weber, William Zorach, and others. Women and lesser-known artists represented in the exhibition include Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Blanche Lazell, Eugenie Baizerman, Helen Torr, Florine Stettheimer, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Marguerite Zorach.

To highlight the Southwest—specifically Taos and Santa Fe—as an important center of a vibrant modernism, the exhibition presents works by Victor Higgins, Cady Wells, and William Penhallow Henderson, who found inspiration among the landscape and region’s peoples.

A section of works by the American Abstract Artists, founded in 1936 in New York City and a predecessor to the New York School and Abstract Expressionism, explore the group’s significant contributions, which led to the acceptance of abstraction in the United States.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit: Florine Stettheimer, Easter Picture (Imagen de pascua), c. 1915-1917. Oil on canvas. Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer.