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In the early 1980s, the art world didn’t know what to make of Andy Warhol. Already famous for silkscreening all-American icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Warhol had begun to represent more problematic iconography with equally deadpan irony. Most troubling of all was the hammer and sickle—a symbol of the Soviet Union—which had become an emblem of Communist aggression and Cold War tension. Warhol astutely recognized that the hammer and sickle had fallen into the same category as Marilyn, turned into kitsch by endless replication.
Warhol’s articulation of this equivalence was bound to resonate with Martin Muller, an art dealer who had recently made his name with the first show of Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde paintings in San Francisco. Muller had seen the Soviet propaganda machine from the inside. Visiting the Factory one afternoon in 1982, Muller offered Warhol a solo show at Modernism.
Warhol’s first-ever gallery appearance in Northern California, the Modernism exhibition drew a crowd. Hundreds of people attended the opening. A month later, it was still the talk of the town. Muller had guaranteed to sell two of Warhol’s paintings, priced at a bargain $25,000 apiece. He’d sold only one and had to buy the second work for himself.
Forty-two years later, as the gallery celebrates its 45th anniversary, nobody has any doubts about Warhol’s importance or Muller’s prescience. From the Russian and Ukrainian avant-gardes to Pop; Photorealism to socio-political art, etc., Modernism has consistently exhibited work that less adventurous galleries have shunned, only to show time and again that artistic quality is more important than popular taste.
Part I of the 45th anniversary show featured the Russian and Ukrainian avant-gardes as well as several other areas of concentration such as Nouveau Réalisme and hard-edge abstraction. Opening on September 26th, Part II will largely complete the picture. Alongside one of Warhol’s hammer-and-sickle paint drawings, the new exhibit features work by a couple other seminal Pop artists who once struggled only to triumph. Mel Ramos, who independently started to work with superheroes at the same time as Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol, is represented by two 1960s works: a painting depicting the Phantom Lady and a drawing of Superman. Ed Ruscha, currently the subject of a major career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is represented by So, one of his signature word paintings. For all the manifest differences between Soviet propaganda, American superheroes, and glib turns of phrase, these three works show how Pop art has uniquely foregrounded images and language so familiar as to be practically imperceptible. The artwork awakens the viewer to the sociocultural operating system of contemporary society.
Pop strategies and aesthetics have taken different directions in the hands of younger generations, and Modernism has been attentive to these important developments. Since the 1980s, Jerry Kearns has given Pop iconography a decidedly political turn, often through his deft juxtaposition of imagery that society compartmentalizes, turning a blind eye to the relationship between categories such as consumer culture and warfare. Hearts & Minds, for instance juxtaposes a ‘60s-era comic strip kissing scene with the famous Vietnam War photograph documenting a nine-year-old girl running naked through the street following an American napalm bombing. Even more recently, Shawn Huckins has appropriated work of famous painters such as John Singleton Copley’s 1782 Midshipman Augustus Brine, irreverently cloaking the fashionable subject in outrageously colorful yarn. Woven using a latch hook technique learned from Huckins’ grandmother, the textile tweaks the masculine posturing of the future British admiral.
Peter Sarkisian is another Modernism artist who utilizes mixed media to upset expectations. His Ink Blot is an animation in which a man emerges from a spilled bottle of ink and crawls to a sheet of paper on which he makes his mark, only to fade away. This neo-Surrealist work is featured in a video room that also includes mixed media video works by Naomie Kremer (who projects a moving female figure on one of her figural abstractions such that the brushwork comes to life), and Jonathon Keats (who has concocted a TV dinner for plants by immersing them in the colored light of a television for their photosynthetic delectation). Set in dreamy darkness, all of these works evoke alternative realities.
Photography is another highlight of the exhibition, including one of Judy Dater’s most iconic images, a 1974 portrait of an elderly Imogen Cunningham happening upon a nude female model, Twinka Thiebaud, in Yosemite. By evoking and challenging historical works such as Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone, Dater’s double portrait makes a decidedly feminist statement on the history of art. Also of note is a 1939 vintage print of Lisa Fonssagrives vertiginously posed atop the Eiffel Tower by the great Dadaist and later, midcentury fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld.
When he first moved to Paris in the ‘30s, before he made his name shooting fashion for Vogue, Blumenfeld created a series of portraits of important French artists including Henri Matisse, who he subsequently befriended. The influence of Matisse on the younger artist is evident in Blumenfeld’s treatment of flesh and garments in both the fashion photography and his many artistic nudes. So, it’s apt that the Modernism exhibition also includes one of Matisse’s odalisques, previously shown in the gallery’s retrospective of Matisse’s prints.
Beyond the U.S., Asia, the Middle East and the USSR, Muller has focused on Francophone Europe, including France and Switzerland. Of particular note in the 45th anniversary show are important Cubist works by Henri Hayden, Albert Gleizes, and Georges Valmier. (Created in 1919, Hayden’s still life painting reveals how deeply his work was in dialogue with contemporaries including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris.)
Nearly two decades before the 2022 Matisse exhibition, Modernism hosted the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to works by the great Swiss architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. Better known as Le Corbusier, Jeanneret introduced Modernist principles to housing and whole cities. His artistic practice was underappreciated throughout the 20th century. Many connoisseurs of his contributions to urbanism dismissed his drawings and collages and gouache paintings as diversions. Le Corbusier knew better, writing that he had “found the intellectual seed of my urbanism and my architecture” within his purely artistic practice. The exhibition at Modernism helped to buttress this claim, and also to reveal some of the visual foundations of his lyricism.
Like Andy Warhol and many other artists featured in Modernism’s more than five hundred exhibitions, Le Corbusier is seen today in a way that Muller anticipated. On a daily basis, Modernism functions as a gallery, but the long-term vision and supporting scholarship give the gallery the artistic heft of a museum.
THE PUBLIC IS INVITED TO A RECEPTION FOR THE ARTISTS ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10TH FROM 6:00-8:00PM
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CALL: 415-541-0461
OR EMAIL: INFO@MODERNISMINC.COM
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