1900 Rediscovered - art exhibition

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Michael Duncan

With an evenhanded presentation of avant-garde rebels, salon bigwigs and mainstream favorites, an international exhibition recaptures the breadth and variety of visual expression at the dawn of the last century.

Welcome to "Art History Y2K." Although discontent with conventional 20th-century art history has been simmering for decades, the new millennium has prompted an onslaught of institutionally engineered revisionism. The theme-based, mixed-era juxtapositions at the new Tate Modern [see p. 98] and the slew of approaches tried out in the temporary rehangs of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection [see A.i.A., May '00] are widely publicized curatorial efforts to look beyond Alfred Barr's now infamous flowchart of isms featured in the catalogue for the 1936 MOMA show "Cubism & Abstract Art."

The exhibition now at the Guggenheim Museum and co-organized with London's Royal Academy of Arts, "1900: Art at the Crossroads," offers perhaps the most daring--and most fundamental--challenge to the conventional understanding of the roots of 20th-century art. Organizers Robert Rosenblum, MaryAnne Stevens, Norman Rosenthal and Ann Dumas achieve this by means of a straightforward premise: they simply display the startlingly broad range of art made in or around the year 1900.

According to Barr, the important art of the last century began under the sway of Neo-Impressionism and Synthetism, with Fauvism, Analytical Cubism and Futurism just on the horizon. Traditionally, works that didn't fit or foretell those categories have been swept under the carpet, duly confined to museum backrooms and basements. "1900" boldly pulls the rug on that conventional approach, releasing salon warhorses, lesser-known gems and outre oddities that both broaden our understanding of the dawn of modernism and expand the heritage of many contemporary ideas and strategies.

Video artist Bill Viola has stated that the problems of today's culture don't stem from the glut of media images but from a dearth of truly provocative and poetical ones. As if in that spirit, "1900" serves up a "provocative glut." By knowingly ignoring art-historical prejudices, the show aims to broaden the standard account of the beginning of the last century. Kicking off with a core group of works that were exhibited in the Exposition Decennale, the international art show at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle or World's Fair, the curators present a raucous mix of styles and approaches that proves that the turn of the 20th century was every bit as pluralistic as today.

The Exposition opened at a time of great social and cultural change. 1900 Paris saw the inauguration of the metro, the Orsay train station and the spectacular Pont Alexandre III, as well as the world's first zeppelin flight. Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published that year, and Bram Stoker's Dracula had come out in 1897. The Exposition's Palais de l'Electrcite, rigged with 5,700 incandescent bulbs, lavished electrical illumination on an astounded public, prompting Giacomo Balla, visiting from Rome, to create an awed rendering of it, The World's Fair at Night (Luna Park), 1900.

Featuring over 5,000 art works, the Exposition Decennale was a stew of art crammed onto the walls and floors of the newly built Grand Palais. (Two galleries at the Royal Academy and one at the Guggenheim were hung salon-style in the mode of the Exposition, amply demonstrating the Fair's visual overkill.) Although the Exposition included works from 29 countries, over 50 percent of the exhibition space was devoted to French art. Beyond the unabashed nationalism, the show had plenty of curatorial inconsistencies. Organizational disputes led to the virtual exclusion of works by important figures such as Pissarro, Monet, Vuillard and Denis.

The show "1900" doesn't aim for a historical judgment of its predecessor (though it does include the aforementioned absent painters). The new exhibition simply uses the fair as a springboard, fleshing out the Exposition's look at the variety of works being made in the Western world at that time. And while the French still dominate, the current show includes a greater percentage of international art. In both the London and New York hangings, no places of privilege have been given to accepted masters such as Rodin, Cezanne, Renoir and Gauguin. Their formal experiments are subsumed within thematic groupings alongside more naturalistic works by a host of lesser-known artists such as Harriet Backer, Ludwig Herterich, William Rothenstein and Julio Ruelas.

This mix not only introduces a batch of fascinating yet neglected works, it challenges the long-entrenched bias which privileges formal innovation over psychology and narrative in early-20th-century art studies. If the pitfalls of formalist criticism teach us anything, it is that form and content are symbiotic concerns; any critical theory runs amok when considering one without the other. The time seems right to examine the ramifications of the genres that dominated the 19th century, and whose vestiges remain in the current revival of figurative art.