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Read the late-breaking reviews of the first show to open in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Treasures to Go tour. Modernism & Abstraction opened January 7 in Miami, Florida.

A Century's Worth of Art Gems at FIU

BY ELISA TURNER

published Sunday, January 9, 2000, in the Miami Herald

"What better time than the first month of the new century to look back at some of the most free-spirited American art of the last one?

[The] story of native artists soaking up sources from abroad to find their own voice at home is admirably set forth in Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures From the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at the Art Museum at Florida International University through March 26.

This traveling show . . . includes 67 paintings and sculptures, beginning with Max Weber's forested scene of chiseled, Picasso-esque nudes from 1909 and concluding with 1990s paintings by Eric Fischl, David Hockney and Mark Tansey . . .

[Georgia] O'Keeffe's towering, rarely reproduced Cityscape With Roses is a showstopper, a recent gift to the Smithsonian from the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. It was inspired by the artist's view from her suite on the 28th floor of the Shelton Hotel, at Lexington Avenue and 48th Street in Manhattan. O'Keeffe manages to convey the brute, lunging presence of granite skyscrapers, but imparts to these towers a quicksilver dynamism . . . Roszak's Recording Sound is not a masterwork like Cityscape with Roses, but it is a remarkable, pre-Rauschenberg combination of painting and sculpture. A futuristic painting of a gramophone, it shows a miniature three-dimensional stage set emerging from the gramophone's "speaker,'' implying the fusion of sound and movement . . .

There's major variety to treasure in a show like this, from Wayne Thiebaud's slot machine humorously rendered in sugar-frosted colors to Josef Albers' radiant lemon-hued square that glows in space like one of James Turrell's light installations.

Whether rigorous and hard-edged, or loose and splashy, the flexible legacy of abstraction never strays far from the imagery. It's apparent not only in Milton Avery's fluid pink and green landscape of 1959 or William Baziotes' shimmering early '60s vision of floating calligraphy, but also in Frederick Brown's pulsing 1983 homage to African-American folk hero Stagger Lee . . . One wonders how we could have ever raced through the 20th Century without abstract art."

Pictured: Stuart Davis (1894–1964), Int'l Surface No. 1,1960, oil, 57 1/8 x 45 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc.