1900 Rediscovered - art exhibition

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Michael Duncan

In her glittering breastplate and golden helmet, Gustav Klimt's Pallas Athene (1898) is a statuesque symbol of female invincibility. The piercing gaze, voluptuous body and untamed mane of Edvard Munch's The Beast (1901) describe a woman who has completely rejected the pieties and expectations of the Victorian era. A group of depictions of Salome serving up John the Baptist's head by Wilhelm Trubner, Lovis Corinth and Jean Benner blend power and sexuality with an up-front, amoral assertiveness that seems prescient of today's postfeminism.

Symbolism, which predominates in the "Woman--Man" section, has long been marginalized as an intensely literary movement cut off from the formal experimentation of the 20th century. Yet, with its emphasis on baroque spirituality, decadence, androgyny and gender rage, it seems an undeniable precedent for much of the art of the past 20 years. Critical reassessments (particularly Brain Dijkstra's 1986 book Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture) have taken a hard-nosed, scornful approach to the movement's depiction of femme fatales and voluptuous spirits. In the past decade, however, postfeminism's more freewheeling acceptance of the intertwined roles of sexuality and power has led to widespread exploration of Symbolist themes in a broad range of contemporary works by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Andres Serrano, Mike Kelley, Robert Gober, Karen Kilimnick, Shirin Neshat, Lucien Freud, Monica Majoli, Amy Adler and Janine Antoni. Furthermore, the mysticism of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Conner and Bill Viola seems rooted in Symbolist notions about the transcendent nature of art.

Sections of "1900" devoted to portraits and landscapes provide particularly strong showcases for underknown international artists. Ilya Repin's anxious Portrait Study of Ignatiev (1902), Prince Paolo Troubetzkoy's vibrant bronze bust, Count Leo Tolstoy (1899), Mikhail Vrubel's fanciful Portrait of Nadezhda Sabela-Vrubel at the Piano (ca. 1900), Boris Kustodiyev's dashing Portrait of Bilibin (1901) and two virtuosic portraits by Valentine Serov (neither included in New York) make one long for a full survey of turn-of-the-century Russian art. Lush, formally daring landscapes by Auguste Baud-Bovy, Albijn van den Abeele and Ludwig von Hofmann more than hold their own next to works by Monet, Munch and Cezanne. Throughout the show are works of astounding quality by Scandinavian artists, particularly Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Pekka Halonen and Eero Jarnefelt of Finland.

Sections on "Social Scenes," "Rural Scenes" and "The City" present a complex view of industrialization and the changing social structures of the time. The glittering cafe crowds depicted by the Impressionists have dwindled to a group of diehard barflies at Last Call. Seemingly enjoying one for the road are the in-your-face floozie of Maurice de Vlaminck's The Bar (1900), Picasso's wizened Absinthe Drinker (1901) and the hunched-over, slablike deadbeats of his Two Women at a Bar (1902). Of a different order is The Awakening of the Abandoned Child (1894), Eugene Robert's meticulously detailed marble sculpture of an infant abandoned on a church doorstep, which demonstrates how the skilled illusionistic rendering of socially charged subject matter can transform a sentimental theme into chilling political art.