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Modern Masters MODERN MASTERS MODERN MASTERS: European Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art Edited by William S. Lieberman THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART NEW YORK The exhibition was made possible by a grant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from Knoll International. The loan of the works of art was made possible, in part, by a grant to The Museum of Modern Art from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, in Washington, D.C. This volume was published to accompany the exhibition of fifty-one paintings from The Museum of Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 5-September 21, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Modern masters. "Volume ... to accompany the exhibition of fifty­ one paintings from the Museum of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 5-September 21, 1980." 1. Painting, European-Catalogs. 2. Painting Modern, -19th century-Europe-Catalogs. 3. Painting, Modern-20th century-Europe- Cata­ logs. 4. New York (City). Museum of Modern Art­ Catalogs. I. Lieberman, William Slattery, 1924- II. New York (City). Museum of Modern Art. I] I. New York (City). Metropolitan Museum of Art. ND457 .M62 759.06'074'01471 80-17459 ISBN 0-87099-246-5 (pbk.) Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Bradford D. Kelleher, Publisher John P. O'Neill, Editor in Chief Joanna Ekman, Copy Editor Peter Oldenburg, Designer Cover: Paul Cezanne, The Bather (photograph: Sandak, Inc.) FOREWORD Modern Masters: European Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art puts on exhibition some fifty European works acquired by The Mu­ seum of Modern Art, New York, between 1934 and 1979. The paintings shown date from 1885 to 1950. This selection does not, of course, at­ tempt to be a comprehensive view of The Museum of Modern Art's holdings. Paintings by the Futurists and by Mondrian, for instance, had previously been promised on loan elsewhere and therefore could not be included here. Nevertheless, even without works by these artists or by Picasso - the latter reserved for the exhibition Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, with which The Museum of Modern Art concludes its Fiftieth Anniversary Year- Modern Masters provides not only a con­ stellation of European masterworks but also a group of paintings essential to the history of the modern movement. Astonishingly enough, all of these works are owned by one museum. On behalf of the Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Modern Masters, as well as to confirm the Metro­ politan's own participation in the Picasso retrospective. To that exten­ sive survey of Picasso's art, the Metropolitan has loaned eight major paintings and drawings. Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art has devel­ oped an attentive audience, first in New York, and then nationally and internationally. It has also attracted many generous donors. Chief among them, as indicated in this selection, were Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, her son Nelson A. Rockefeller, and James Thrall Soby. Not all the paintings included in Modern Masters are unfamiliar to the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. Mira's stunning mural, for instance, was welcomed here in 1967. It is a particular pleasure to bring back five paintings first shown by the Metropolitan Museum some sixty years ago. What was that exhibition, and which were the paintings included in it? Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings opened at The Met­ ropolitan Museum of Art in May 1921. That survey, containing 127 works, began with Courbet and Manet and ended with Matisse and Picasso. The selection was limited to European artists, and most of the works were French. 5 The five paintings featured in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings now shown again are: Cezanne's The Bather and his Still Life with Apples (nos. 5-6), Gauguin's The Moon and the Earth (no. 20), and Redan's Silence (no. 43)- these four lent anonymously by a col­ lector and a dealer- and Derain's Window at Vers (no. 14), lent by a New York lawyer, the legendary John Quinn. Today, several additional paintings from that exhibition are permanently installed in the Metro­ politan Museum's recently opened Andre Meyer Galleries, which display our collection of nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture. The circumstances and purpose of the 1921 exhibition, and the criti­ cal and public response to it, deserve further study. Bryson Burroughs, then Curator of Paintings, wrote a precise and perceptive introduction to the accompanying catalogue. The show, he said, "was undertaken in response to a request from a group of art lovers - Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham, Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, Arthur B. Davies, Paul Dougherty, Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Jr., John Quinn, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney- who felt that the educational value of such an exhibition would be greater if held in our Museum, where the modern works could be easily com­ pared with examples of art of long-recognized excellence, shown in near-by galleries." Modern Masters is not only a harvest of paintings from the collec­ tion of The Museum of Modern Art. It is also a tribute to that museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and to his leadership, scholarship, and vision. No other individual in the museum profession so influenced the way we look at the visual arts of our time. In the preparation of Modern Masters, I wish to acknowledge the warm collaboration of Richard E. Oldenburg, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, and of his supportive staff. I also want to thank those at the Metropolitan Museum who have been responsible for the exhibi­ tion itself as well as for its catalogue. The loan of these works of art was made possible, in part, by a grant to The Museum of Modern Art from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. The exhibition was made possible by a grant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from Knoll International. Philippe de Montebello Director 6 MODERN MASTERS 1. FRANCIS BACON, British (1909- Study of a Baboon (1953) Oil on canvas, 6ft. 6 in. x 4ft. 6 in. (198 x 137.1 em.), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1979 Illustration is, for most of our painters, an original sin which they labor strenuously to be absolved of. Mr. Bacon is a master of this despised aesthetic atavism and does not hesitate to flaunt this mastery. He gets away with it, too. For he is also in possession of an unerring pictorial intelligence. He is one of those painters who appears to achieve exact­ ly what he sets out to achieve. Clearly he has a lot more on his mind than exercises in technical ex­ cellence, however. He is a visionary of a particular sort - a specialist in the grotesqueries of modern life. He is a connoisseur of extreme emotions, with a taste for the macabre and a gift for transmuting the psychopathology of everyday life into a compelling and very personal pictorial imagery. There is nothing of the commonplace in his work. Everything is pitched to the intensity of a scream. The pressure is unremitting, a little brutal, and more than a little calculated. Yet, despite the calculation, it has the force of an involuntary avowal. Hilton Kramer The Age of the A vant-Garde Bacon is fascinated by the drama of contemporary existence as record­ ed in the pictorial sections of the press. Photographic quotations, thor­ oughly transformed, are often used in his work. One of his favorite books - "his bible," as a friend of his put it, is Marius Maxwell's Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, published in 1925 by William Heinemann, Ltd~ The photographs are chiefly of large wild animals such as the elephant and the rhinoceros, but among the plates is a remarkable photograph of baboons in acacia trees. The ape at the right is perched on a forked tree trunk extremely like that in Bacon's Study of a Baboon. But how to explain the wire cage in which Bacon's ape is half imprisoned? ... The story, probably apocryphal, is that he was fascinated to see monkeys of various kinds caged in the parks, while outside others roamed in freedom. James Thrall Soby The James Thrall Soby Collection 8 2. MAX BECKMANN, German (1884-1950) Departure (1932-33) Oil on canvas; triptych, center panel 7 ft. 3/4 in. x 45 3/8 in. (215.3 x 115.2 em.), side panels each 7 ft. 3/4 in. x 391/4 in. (215.3 x 99.7 em.), The Museum of Modern Art. New York, Given anonymously (by exchange), 1964 The Gothic spirit inherent in Departure is most strikingly evident in the contrast between the serene otherworldliness of the center section and the violence of the wings. The latter depict dark nightmarish scenes of brutality and degradation. On one side a stocky man in a striped polo shirt holds aloft a bludgeonlike bag of fish, as though about to "ex­ ecute" a partially clothed woman who kneels at his feet with her arms bound stiffly above her head. She bends over a round, green object that has been thought to be a glass globe. A newspaper- one can easi­ ly read "ZEITU(NG)" -lies on the floor immediately to the right of the woman and the strange green object. Directly beyond the brutal execu­ tioner looms the strictly frontal form of a naked, gagged, and mutilated man of corpselike paleness, whose bloody stumps of arms are tied above his head to a stumpy column.
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