Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter, part two

On Monday I introduced the Amon Carter's Intimate Modernism show and talked about how much fun it was to see a museum present an American modernism show when everyone else seems to be abandoning the period. Continuing...

In 1943, with World War II in full-fight on four continents, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock separately hit on the mix of scale and abstraction that drove three decades of American post-war art. Pollock worked through Picasso and European modernism on the way to his drip-fields, and Still mixed Western regionalism with what he saw in his job as a steel inspector in California's East Bay shipyards to arrive at his giant, scything canyons.

Meanwhile, in Fort Worth, Texas, a group of artists explored some of the same then-recent trends in art, added some American influences and basked in each others company. The Fort Worth Circle didn't advance modernism in any particularly new or noteworthy direction but their work provides a fascinating record of how Americans synthesized modernism, as well as how a group of artists pictorially responded to a world war thousands of miles away.

Take Kelly Fearing's 1941 Attic Piece (above), a haunting painting in which Fearing introduces Dada and Hartnett to Hitler's eastern advance. The obvious Dada reference is a broken doll, a woman whose upper arms are missing and whose hoop skirt has been stripped from its wire underpinnings. Then the painting references trompe l'oeil, including nails 'projecting' from board, newspapers, and household objects.

But something is fantastically wrong here: The painting references those tropes while rejecting them: Fearing's nails are painted with an impressionists brush, not a realist's. Hartnett's famed functional hinges are replaced by two useless hangars, one of which is intact and one of which is completely bent out of shape. A cup is turned over. The newspaper he paints tumbles into the foreground of the painting and includes only one legible headline. It is painted far from realistically: "Germa... attacks Russia..." The words 'Germans' and 'Russians' trail off, focusing our attention on the word 'attacks.' Fearing's painting is about a world askew.

Fearing painted Attic Piece when he was 23. In June 1941, probably after Fearing finished college in Louisiana, Germany invaded Russia. Fearing's painting seems to acknowledge what many Americans understood (and disliked): That America was probably going to end up involved in another world war. Within two years of making Attic Piece Fearing moved to Fort Worth to work in the defense industries and 'joined' the Fort Worth Circle. More later today...