American Modernism: The Shein Collection

The early American modernists may be usefully understood as the generation of artists born primarily between 1875 and 1890 who promulgated the new languages of modern art—fauvism, cubism, futurism, orphism, synchromism, expressionism, Dada—both in the United States and abroad. This remarkably small group constituted a true avant-garde; over the course of the twentieth century legions of artists would follow in their wake. Yet as the century unfolded, the contribution of these painters and sculptors to the history of modernism was at times illuminated and at other times obscured. A point of near total eclipse was reached after World War II, with the promotion of abstract expressionism as the ultimate “triumph” of American painting. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a clearer vision emerged of the early American modernists’ crucial role in the development of a modernist culture both in America and Europe. The Shein Collection, consisting of twenty representative works by nineteen of the most important first-generation modernists, reflects this greater understanding.

The careers of the artists in the Shein Collection attest to a predilection, integral to the modernist enterprise, to break free from personal and national identity and their attendant psychological and geographical bounds to, in the American poet Ezra Pound’s epochal phrase, “make it new.” Before the 1913 Armory Show, Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris and Alfred Stieglitz in New York created a dynamic transatlantic forum for artists such as Patrick Henry Bruce, Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, and Max Weber, as well as for the great European innovators Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. After the Armory Show, largely orchestrated by Arthur B. Davies and a landmark in the history of modernism, Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell issued their synchromist manifesto on color painting and executed works of great chromatic complexity, while Hartley and Joseph Stella developed their singular styles, and Weber advanced his cubist practice. In 1915 Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York, where, inspired by the commercial and technological culture of the city, undertook variations on his revolutionary idea of the “readymade.” Duchamp’s brilliance soon inspired such precocious artists as Charles Demuth, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, and Charles Sheeler, and was seminal to the formulation of American precisionism. In the 1920s, Marin, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe, prominent members of the Stieglitz group and well versed in the lessons of European modernism, pursued a refined, nature-based abstraction that Stieglitz promoted as distinctively American. At the same time Bruce and John Storrs developed their own mature modernist styles in France.