Jeffery A. Lowell, M.D.
champions organ donation awareness
|
Jeffery A. Lowell, M.D. champions organ donation awareness |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
Janson's legacy honored in Gallery
of Art exhibition By Liam Otten In the mid-1940s, H.W. Janson, author of the influential textbook History of Art, served as curator at the University, where he built what he proudly called "the finest collection of contemporary art assembled on any American campus."
Starting Aug. 30, the Gallery of Art will honor that distinguished history with H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis, an exhibition of more than 20 masterworks from the University collection. The show -- which debuted in a slightly different form at New York's Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in March -- features works by many of the 20th century's foremost European and American modernists. The exhibit is free and open to the public. Artists include Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, Paul Klee, Ferdinand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Matisse, Ludwig Meidner, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Yves Tanguy. "Janson was the instrumental force in selecting and acquiring modern art for the University," said Sabine M. Eckmann, Ph.D., curator for the Gallery of Art, who organized the exhibition. "Having arrived in the United States in 1935 as an exile from Hitler's Germany, he rejected the National Socialists' nationalistic interpretation and propagation of German art and was committed to cosmopolitanism." The show opens with a reception from 5-8 p.m. Aug. 30 and remains on view through Dec. 8.
Janson's selections tend to emphasize international European movements, especially cubism and constructivism. Highlights include Picasso's early collage Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912); Gris' Still Life With Playing Cards (1916); and Braque's Still Life With Glass (1930). American modernists are represented by Guston's If This Be Not I and Calder's Bayonets Menacing a Flower (both 1945). Janson, who left Germany in 1935 to protest Nazi cultural policies, also focused on the work of surrealists-in-exile. Major acquisitions include Ernst's visionary landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44), which conjures a haunted, war-ravaged Europe as well as a fantastical, primeval American West; and Tanguy's moody La Tour Marine (Tower of the Sea) (1944), whose bright colors and large-scaled objects seem to reflect the artist's arrival in New York. "The scope of Janson's undertaking was unusual, considering that the most progressive American museums had only begun collecting modern work in the late 1920s and 1930s," Eckmann said. "In light of the strong anti-modernist trends then dominating the American art world --including university museums --one could even call it bold." Subsequent curators Frederick Hartt, William N. Eisendrath Jr. and others worked with prominent collectors -- such as Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Morton D. May, Etta Steinberg, Sydney M. Shoenberg and Mr. and Mrs. Richard K. Weil -- to round out Janson's early modern, cubist and expressionist projects.
The accompanying catalog features Eckmann's essay "Exilic Vision," a consideration of Janson's emigration, of his connections with prominent New York-based exile dealers and of the influence both would exert on his views about contemporary art. The book also reproduces a previously unpublished lecture from 1981, in which Janson recalls his years at the University and building the modern collection. The Gallery of Art is located in Steinberg Hall. Hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays; and noon-4:30 p.m. weekends. The gallery is closed Mondays. For more information, call 935-4523. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
