About the Fall of Modernism
The New Mexico Museum of Art and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum will present The Fall of Modernism: A Season of American Art, three related exhibitions and programs, between September 2015 and running through January of 2016.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum showcases From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Collection Foundation from September 25, 2015 to January 10, 2016. Representing one of the finest collections of American Modernism ever gathered, the exhibition explores the emergence of America’s first truly homegrown, avant-garde art movement. With more than 60 works of art, including important works by Georgia O’Keeffe as well as artist like Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove and a dozen others, the show reveals how America’s vanguard artists created a vibrant new language of abstract art with a distinct national character. Learn more >
At the New Mexico Museum of Art O’Keeffe in Process opens September 11 and will tell the story of the artist’s working technique. Preliminary sketches and photographs will be shown alongside finished works to demonstrate the steps, the thinking, and the technical art-making process of this 20th Century New Mexico Master. Artworks span the artist’s career from early portraits of family members created in 1905, to paintings executed during stays at Lake George in the late teens and first half of the twenties, to her iconic depictions of New Mexico, to her discovery of the view from the sky. The exhibition examines what makes an O’Keeffe artwork recognizable as an O’Keeffe and illuminates some of the ways that the artist approached her compositions. O’Keeffe in Process will feature more than 50 paintings, drawings, and supporting materials drawn from the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s collections, making this a rare opportunity to see many of these artworks together in one space. Included will be nine O’Keeffe paintings from the Museum of Art’s collection. The exhibition runs through January 17, 2016.
Also at the New Mexico Museum of Art opening October 2, 2015 and running through February 21, 2016, will be An American Modernism. The prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings on view, all from the 1920s and 1930s, explore how artists struggled to forge a distinctively American voice in the visual arts during the early years of the twentieth century. While some believed that American art should be identified with the precision and dynamism of the machine age, others rejected industrialization and commercialism for the perceived authenticity of nature and rural life. The tensions between these motives and the artistic vocabulary of modernism are showcased in this rich selection of more than fifty works of art.
