Displaying items by tag: George Ault

Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, a striking new exhibition, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art June 6. The exhibition, on view through August 31, showcases American Modernist paintings from the 1920s to the beginning of World War II, a period marked by significant change and compounded by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The more than sixty artists featured in Modern Dialect hail from all parts of the United States, and painted wherever they found inspiration. These artists adhere to a common interest, more than to a single style, in portraying their realities in a decidedly modern fashion. The exhibition reveals the scope of the American modernist aesthetic in the early 20th century, and the vision and integrity each artist brought to the representation of the American experience – from rural landscapes to modern industrial cities (and the people who inhabit them) to purely abstracted compositions.

George Ault and 1940s America

March 11–September 5, 2011
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
For information visit www.americanart.si.edu or call 202.633.7970

During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created precise, yet eerie pictures—works of art that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in American in those years. The beautiful geometries of Ault’s paintings make personal worlds of clarity and composure to offset a real world he felt was in crisis.

To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by global conflict. Although much has been written about the triumph of the Second World War, what has dimmed over time are memories of the anxious tenor of life on the home front. Viewers will be brought back into the world of the American 1940s, not through grand actions, cataclysmic events, posters, or headlines, but through the least likely of places and spaces. The exhibition centers on paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948, with additional works by twenty-two other artists, some as celebrated as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, and others scarcely known to today’s audience. From their remote corners of the country, these artists conveyed a still quietude that seems filled with potentialities.

The exhibition will travel to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, where it will be on view from October 8 to December 13, 2011, and then to the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia, from February 18 to April 16, 2012. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.