"Pioneers of Modern Art" in America at the Whitney

This was a retrospective of the works produced by the American Modernists from 1908-1922, the era when the famed Armory Show shocked the art world. The critics in 1946 mostly found the show interesting and informative from a historical perspective, but wrote that most of the artists represented had not yet matured into their own distinctive styles in this early period but were still experimenting in an academic fashion with the styles coming out of France. There were some notable exceptions, mostly among artists who were already established like Maurice Prendergast and Max Weber who brought their own take to the new movements.

Photographer Alfred Stieglitz had exhibited many of these artists during that period in his gallery and the artists whom he made celebrities such as John Marin, Arthur G. Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, had a separate section in this show. Among others represented in the exhibition were Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, Charles Burchfield, Man Ray, Gaston Lachaise, Robert Laurent, Maurice Sterne, Charles Sheeler, Abraham Walkowitz, Marsden Hartley and Joseph Stella. Stieglitz still had a gallery at this time that represented many of the artists he had introduced. He died in July of a stroke.

The Modernists had been denounced by much of the art establishment when they emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. This week's Time quoted a New York Times art critic who wrote in 1911 of Max Weber, "It is difficult to write of these monstrosities with moderation." By 1946 many of these artists had become the art establishment, although they had not won over cultural conservatives, of which there were many in the city. Right wingers complained that modern art was a Communist plot to sap Americans of their character. Left wing advocates of Socialist Realism saw modern art as an effort by capitalists like the Rockefellers and Whitneys to strip art of its social content. For this week's Sunday Times Magazine, journalist and illustrator S.J. Woolf penned an embarrassingly retrograde article comparing the work of acclaimed artists of the day like Picasso and Dali to that of infants and the mentally deranged. His article was met by a flood of letters to the editor, most of which thanked Woolf for standing up to the madness, some predicting that he would be remembered for his courage long after Picasso had been relegated to the dustbin.

A surprise in the exhibit was a work by regionalist Thomas Hart Benton who had experimented with modernism early in his career while studying in Paris but later turned vehemently against it. In a review in the current issue, Time quoted Benton as saying that to him Paris meant "a girl friend to take care of you and run you- a lot of talk and an escape into a world of pretense and theory." He said he had "wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along, and it took me ten years to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." He later lived in New York for twenty years, returning to his native Missouri in the mid-thirties. A rabid homophobe, Benton denounced the New York art scene as "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait." A teacher as well as an artist, ironically he taught Jackson Pollack, who would become a central figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement that was emerging in 1946 and would soon become the dominant movement in the postwar art world. Benton's own position in the art firmament declined in the postwar period as his poster-like style fell out of favor.

At this time the Whitney was 15 years old and housed in three former townhouses on West Eighth Street. It had been founded by Gertrude Whitney to display the work of American contemporary artists who were ignored by the Metropolitan and underrepresented by the then new Museum of Modern Art, which had focused initially on European modernists. The museum expanded in 1939. By 1946 the Whitney had come under management by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, noted for its conservatism. In 1949, deciding the space was inadequate and the Village no longer the art mecca it once was, the Whitney began planning for a move uptown.