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Find old Modern Art articles here. Find information on Modern Painting, artists, 1920s modernists, newspaper articles about modernism and more.
The editors of VANITY FAIR saluted the eighty year-old painter Claude Monet, praising him as
the only remaining member of a little group of painters – Degas, Manet, Renoir and several others – known as the Master Impressionists.
Art alone survives the earthquake shocks of revolution, and Russian art has been doubly secure because of it’s deep-rooted imagination and it’s passionate sincerity.
That was the word from Oliver M. Sayler writing from Moscow as it starved during the Summer of 1919. Sayler, known primarily for his writings on Russian theater from this period, wrote enthusiastically about the Russian Suprematist Casimir Malyevitch, Futurist David Burliuk and The Jack of Diamonds Group; believing deeply in the Russian Revolution, he wrote not a word about how the Soviets mistreated the modern artists of Russia.
To listen to Paul Meltsner one would think that it was fun to be a painter. Looking at his pictures one is compelled to conclude that life is a grim business of industrial strife, with factories shut down or picketed…
A wise-cracker and a wit at the cafe table, Mr. Meltsner is a proletarian artist when he works, and he works hard, he says. Which is what a proletarian artist should do… He exhibits frequently. He sells lithographs when he isn’t selling paintings and is represented in a number of museum collections.
Click here to read a Paul Meltsner review from ART DIGEST.
The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:
Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.
Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.
In order to mark the New York arrival of Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1924), VANITY FAIR’s editors chose to run this anecdote concerning the 1884 creation of the work as well as a reproduction of one of the pencil studies for the profile head of the sitter, Madame Gauterau.
When Fifth Avenue’s Montross Gallery launched an exhibit featuring over one hundred creations by the American painter John Marin (1870 – 1953) in the winter of 1922, art voyager and all-around well-respected critic Paul Rosenfeld (1890 – 1946) was present, and very shortly put pen to paper in order to heap many bon-mots upon the man and his work:
He applies his wash with the directness of impulse that is supposed to be discoverable only in the work of small children. One racks one’s brain for memory of a water-color painter who reveals in every stroke of his brush a more uninhibited urge outward.
The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 Degenerate Art exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism.
The editors of TOUCHSTONE MAGAZINE hired one of John Sloan
A quick read on the subject of that uneasy union that existed between art and industry during the 1930s. References are made to the work of muralists Dunbar D. Beck (1902-1986), Arthur Watkins Crisp (1881 – 1974), Kenneth B. Loomis, Charles S. Dean and Charles Louis Goeller (1901 – 1955).
An appreciative five paragraph essay saluting the Modernist sculptor Constantine Brancusi (1876 – 1957), accompanied by one black and white image of the artist’s work, The Doves. Much of the review concerns the poor relationship Brancusi had with Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917) who
had been his teacher in earlier days.
An art review concerning a 1936 Brooklyn Museum exhibit of woodcut prints by avant-garde German, Russian and French artists. The reviewer details how the medium was rediscovered.
Before Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was killed in the war he strengthened woodcut design in his departure from pretty and representational decoration toward more rugged abstraction…Almost all of these German, Russian and Frenchmen have concentrated their attention on human life. There is no pretty landscape, no picturesque architectural rendering, no still life, no sporting print. Froma a few prints the actual human form has been abstracted. One of these by Wassily Kandinsky ‘looks like a diagram of the contents of a madman’s waste basket’. The rest of the prints are chiefly tragic, mostly pitiful, occasionally derisive comments on the failure of man as an animal.
The ink-stained editors at QUICK MAGAZINE rarely ever concerned themselves with the Bohemian-happenings of the New York art world, but when the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) strayed from the standard-issue art supply tools and used a reflective fabric called Scotchlite in the creation of a 12 foot, three-paneled mural – the editors thought it was news.
An Arthur B. Davies (1862 – 1928) review written by VANITY FAIR art critic Frederick James Gregg following the opening of an exhibition highlighting the the private collection of N.E. Montross. The critic wrote:
Since the death of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847 – 1917), Mr. Davies has been recognized, by persons abroad who are familiar with art in America, as the leading living painter on this side of the Atlantic.
The U.S. had only been actively engaged in World War II for five months when the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882 – 1971) felt the impulse to write about the unique roll an artist must play when a democracy goes to war:
The art of a democracy must be, like democracy itself, of and by and for the people. It must and will reflect the public mood and public interest…Awareness of America, of its infinitely varied beauties and of its sometimes sordid ugliness; awareness of the life of America, of its fulfillments and its failures; awareness, if you like, of God, the landscape architect supreme – and political failure: of the promise of America and of its problems, art has been, or has aimed to be, a revelation. It is for the right to solve these problems our way that we are now at war.
The art of living in the wrong century – this is Saul Steinberg’s (1914 – 1999) own designation for the predicament he has been illustrating for over a decade. In his latest collection, The Passport
A war-time interview with the Welsh painter Augustus John (1878 – 1961).
A few words on the water colors that John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) made in 1917 which pictured the Villa Viscaya in Miami, Florida. The paintings were later purchased by the Worcester Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
A VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE profile of the American painter Robert Henri (1865 – 1929):
Robert Henri does not sympathize with the artists who throw their work in the face of the public with a ‘There, take it or leave it.’ Indeed, he has an almost hieratic belief in the power of the fine arts, not merely to delight, but to improve, to uplift and to educate the masses.
Click here to read further about the 1913 Armory show.
