“American Modern” at
Hackett Freedman Gallery,
San Francisco.
February 3-April 3, 2005
The surprise of “American Modern” comes in large part from Hackett Freedman’s interpretation of its own grand title. All dating from between 1907 and 1942, these paintings, sculptures, and works on paper make the case for a period of advanced American art before Abstract Expressionism claimed the mantle of modernism for its own.
The artists of America’s first modern generation worked to assimilate lessons from the School of Paris and blend them with their nativist intuitions. Take the case of John Marin, whose Landscape (1914) stands out as one of the stunnners of the show. The jazzily askew reds and yellows call to mind the Fauvist palette that enthralled Marin from the day in 1910 when he first visited the Steiglitz Gallery. But they also register his motif: they work to portray the sun refracted through clouds off the Maine coast near Mount Desert Island. In another painter, such a coupling of European Modernism and Emersonian naturalism might not appear so seamless. Certainly, some of Marin’s own pictures fail. His signature style substitutes at times for felt texture. But even those weaker pieces reveal a painter who never allowed an aesthetic program to squelch his own emotion. And in his best pictures, such as Landscape, Marin’s slanted and squiggled brush stroke and his love of the American topos are part and parcel of the same unified urge.
This weave of past and present