Midcentury
October 23, 2010 - February 20, 2011
When asked, at age thirty, whether he painted from nature, Jackson Pollock replied: “I am nature.” The year was 1942, and “nature” had begun to mean things to artists that it had never meant before. That change is an animating theme of Midcentury, a collection installation of photographs, drawings, prints, and paintings of the 1940s and 1950s. Featured artists in this two-part international overview include Barbara Morgan, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Loren MacIver, Peter Blume, Lotte Jacobi, and Roberto Matta.
By 1940 popular culture and fine art alike reflected the influence of Darwinian science and Freudian analysis. Reality and the imagination underwent another big change in August 1945, when atomic science frighteningly rewrote the future. “Biomorphic abstraction,” a key phrase at midcentury, described the hope that in the face of nuclear peril, modern art could be infused (and, for many, redeemed) by the distinctive rhythms and morphology of biology.
Whether they worked in abstract or realist modes, artists began to regard the artwork as a microcosm in which aspects of the larger universe (harmony, conflict, complexity) were brought into focus through a living lens, the artist. Nature, for this generation, was not a set of objects waiting to be translated into pictorial form but a primal force that defied comprehension or control. In the 1960s artists’ romance with indeterminacy would evolve into an art of “happenings,” in which participation and flux became ends in themselves. Midcentury brings to life the moment before that shift, when the crafted object remained (if only just) the aim of art.
Joel Smith Curator of Photography
By 1940 popular culture and fine art alike reflected the influence of Darwinian science and Freudian analysis. Reality and the imagination underwent another big change in August 1945, when atomic science frighteningly rewrote the future. “Biomorphic abstraction,” a key phrase at midcentury, described the hope that in the face of nuclear peril, modern art could be infused (and, for many, redeemed) by the distinctive rhythms and morphology of biology.
Whether they worked in abstract or realist modes, artists began to regard the artwork as a microcosm in which aspects of the larger universe (harmony, conflict, complexity) were brought into focus through a living lens, the artist. Nature, for this generation, was not a set of objects waiting to be translated into pictorial form but a primal force that defied comprehension or control. In the 1960s artists’ romance with indeterminacy would evolve into an art of “happenings,” in which participation and flux became ends in themselves. Midcentury brings to life the moment before that shift, when the crafted object remained (if only just) the aim of art.
Joel Smith Curator of Photography
