1900 Rediscovered - art exhibition

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Michael Duncan

"1900" has opened a Pandora's box of esthetic precursors and fertile art-historical ideas which together indicate the rich social and psychological territory that is neglected in a linear reading of art history. The preoccupation with formal "progress" in tracing the evolution from Cubism to Minimalism ignores much of the texture and individuality of modern art. Moreover, the art-historical progression that leads from Cezanne to Judd does not adequately address or contextualize the pluralist art of today. Contemporary figuration and new realist modes deserve more inclusive versions of 20th-century art history, ones that can track psychological and social themes and leave room for lateral views and eccentric visions.

Discarding the rule book, Rosenblum et al. deal out a brilliant, contentious set of pictures that describe a different dawning of the last century. It is time now for art historians to begin to make sense of this broader, deeper perspective. The last few decades have seen enough Post-Impressionist and Picasso exhibitions. Museums of the world, what's in your storage rooms? Show us your Finns!

"Paris 1900: The `American School' at the Universal Exposition"

The Exposition Universelle offered countries with burgeoning art scenes a key opportunity to prove themselves before an international audience. The year 1900 saw the United States eager to make a case for its developing national esthetic identity. Now a touring exhibition organized by the Montclair Art Museum, "Paris 1900: The `American School' at the Universal Exposition," assembles 98 of the 256 paintings and drawings shown at the fair, along with a selection of the sculpture and decorative arts that were also included.

The American art sections at earlier international expositions in 1855, 1867, 1878 and 1889 had been judged too derivative of dominant French modes. The chief priority of the 1900 selection process (administered by the U.S. State Department) was to establish the existence of a uniquely American school of art. At least 70 percent of the works had to have been created in the U.S., a proviso that still left room for inclusions by star expatriates James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henry Ossawa Tanner and John Singer Sargent. Idealized tonalist landscapes by George Inness chronicled the taming of the American wilderness. Action-packed cowboy narrative paintings such as Charles Schreyvogel's My Bunkie (1899) particularly appealed to the Wild West fantasies of the European audience.

Although mostly conventional in technique, portraits of formidable women by William Merritt Chase, George de Forest Brush, Cecilia Beaux and Charles Sprague Pearce seem to assert the independent nature of the American temperament. A few more experimental pictures did sneak into the mix. Alfred Maurer's At the Window (1899-1900) offers an enigmatic rear view of a seated woman that is executed in crisp painterly strokes. Winslow Homer's allegorical landscape, Fox Hunt (1893), asserted a vigorous strain of American pluck, symbolized by a bushy-tailed, heroic fox ready to fend off a couple of swooping, predatory crows.