[Continued from Exhibition homepage]
This vanguard of mostly young artists was arguably the second form of "pure" American art. Like the Hudson River School, a distinctive American character would attach to the stylistic innovation of the Modernists. Unlike the Hudson River School, the work of the Modernist masters here would be felt among painters around the world. If the 20th century was in fact the American century politically and socially, by the end of the Modernist period, the capital of art had also moved from Europe to New York.

For the Modernists, the Armory Show of 1913 was their Sarajevo. Like the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, its effect rippled out in dynamic currents that re-shaped the world. Despite its decidedly European flavor (Cezanne, Van Gogh and Matisse were a dominant presence), the International Exhibition of Modern Art, produced by the new generation of American artists, was an ignition point for Modernism in this country.

One artist who felt the dynamic pull of contemporary art was Stuart Davis. Near the end of his life, he told Art News magazine that "the contemporary artist had to find inspiration in his own life and environment, rather than going back to the masters of the past." In fact, through the first years of the Modernist movement, Davis was inspired by the European avant-garde; by Van Gogh's high-keyed palette and Cezanne's two-dimensional geometric forms.

Ten Pound Island from 1916 offers a vertical view of a Gloucester boatyard. The brushwork is broad and emphatic; Davis's vivid colors are interpretive, what he called "free-color invention." Yet the work is largely representational, as much about technique as it is about the Massachusetts boatyards. In the years leading up to 1920, Davis continually pushed boundaries of color and form. For the most part, they were mild nudges, with only occasional bold gestures. The artist was barely hinting at the re-invention of structure, line and spatial relationships that would follow in the next three decades.

Drugstore Reflection is more in keeping with the signature re-inventions of Stuart Davis. His syncopated black line moves with a sure, forward momentum, reflecting a Jazz Age cool. He has reinvented a store window as pattern, employing jagged peaks, mirrored shapes and offset angles in his utterly abstracted portrait of a window reflection. It is a tellingly modern detail that the reflection is the subject here-the intangible is made concrete.

Few artists captured the currents of the time, the streamlined, almost hectic Modernism of early 20th-century America, as well as John Marin. Though born in 1870 and arguably of an older generation than many of his peers, by the time of the First World War Marin was already pushing artistic boundaries. As he honed his signature staccato lines and geometric forms, Marin seemed to catch the hastened rhythms of the 20th century.

Without question, the two most favored locations for John Marin were New York City and Maine. A love affair with rural Maine-especially its dramatic coast-would endure through his most prolific and creative period. Lake and Mountain, from 1910, is a startling example of his modern reinterpretation of landscape. Almost abstract, the work is a study in simplicity of form, its elements fields of pigment laid adjacent to one another in a graceful, fluid composition that only suggests the form of the landscape.

Marin might have been speaking of Lake and Mountain when he wrote in 1947, "Is not a work of art the most tantalizing…sort of thing on this Earth-the most vital yet to all a mystery-to not too many a mysterious reality-it cannot be understood; it can be felt."

John Marin's many inspired images of New York City can be felt; they seem to seethe with the restless energy of an ever-changing city. If New York is a constantly evolving urban symphony, he caught each movement. Marin's New York pulsed in a sensual, arcing, visual ballet. His bridges and buildings, his elevated trains and streets were not so much drawn as choreographed. Skyscrapers had motion; bridges leapt over rivers; his city seemed always about to uncoil.

Yet there is nothing impersonal in the whole of his New York work. The forms are all animated; his New Yorkers interact with the architecture of street and skyscraper, often through a deliberate distortion of form and proportion. Through four decades Marin created a unique visual vocabulary for urban art.

New York Series A is a tour de force; his New York has evolved again, this time into a boisterous skyline of sinuous lines interlocking with familiar planar forms. Scrawled figure-eights and other barely tamed lines burst across the composition and break through the margins to create an unforgettable image of a sleepless city.

De Hirsh Margules was born in Romania, but brought up in New York. Part of a generation of immigrants who fully embraced the quickly evolving artistic and social culture of American Modernism, Margules was a fixture in the vibrant, avant-garde Greenwich Village art scene in the 1930s and 1940s, and had more than thirty solo exhibitions.

Margules was a thoroughly "modern" artist, creating works unique to their time and place. They positively hum with a New World energy, an effect achieved by his hot palette, bold brushwork, tilted perspective and veering forms.

Whether painting New York City streets or idyllic New England ports and towns, the artist included decisively modern elements — a phalanx of Model T Fords at the Gansevoort Street ferry, or a looming radar station in Provincetown — into his compositions. Using an abstract shorthand and bold patches of pure color, he also captured the closely packed houses of suburbia's burgeoning developments.

Margules exhibited regularly at the Whitney Museum Annuals 1938 through 1956, and was in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Margules won a Brooklyn Museum Purchase Prize in 1943. His works are included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

A highly sociable artist, Margules made fast friends with the gallery impresario Alfred Stieglitz and through him with John Marin, who was a mainstay at Steiglitz's gallery. Margules described Marin as his "artistic daemon and academy"; both artists had an innate ability to create a sense of vital movement by combing vivid color, fractured space and symbols into the picture plane. Marin himself wrote in the introduction to a 1936 exhibition catalogue for Margules' work that the younger artist had "much intelligence and quick seeing…go and see his work."

The artists who emigrated here viewed modern America through a different prism. Richard Hayley Lever arrived just a year before the earthquake of the Armory Show, already steeped in the Post-Impressionist and avant-garde styles of European painting. His paintings, more traditional in composition and color, are dominated by texture and sinuous brushwork. City Island is typical of the artist's simple treatment of subject matter made vivid by bold interpretive color.

Hayley Lever rode the crest of the Modernist movement, perhaps because his work was so grounded in realism. As in Apple and Pear, his simple forms are filled with vitality, driven by bold color. An early observer of his work noted at one of Lever's first museum shows in America, that his paintings' "vigor and sincerity make an irresistible appeal to the modern spirit."

George Grosz came to Depression-era America in 1933 from Berlin to escape the Nazi authorities. Known for scathingly satirical works in Germany, Grosz was also a founder of the Berlin Dada group. Once established in New York, Grosz was out of physical danger, but his work was still under attack and labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis.

The character of Grosz' art in the United States eased away from caustic commentary, and he was able to focus on the sights and scenes of his new city rather than on caricature and upheaval. Used Tires, New York Street Scene aptly illustrates his ability to sum up a crowded city by combining urban signage, overlapping forms and dense, wide brushstrokes.

Arthur Dove was part of the first wave of American modernists, and was also among the most progressive. An early trip to Europe left him strongly influenced by the pictorial daring of Matisse, Cezanne and the Fauves. Dove would translate that inspiration into a wholly new, American vernacular. Upon his return to New York, he joined the progressive group of artists-including John Marin-exhibiting with Alfred Steiglitz at his gallery, An American Place. Dove was among the boldest of the group, denying the illusion of space and seeking the most abstract working of form and composition.

Dove developed a daringly non-objective style of painting, with the force of nature as his inspiration. Acknowledging nature as the basis of art, the artist explained that "there was the search for a means of expression which did not depend on representation. It should have order, size, intensity, spirit, nearer to the music of the eye…"

This devotion to the spirit of the natural world is evident in his 1942 watercolor, From a Causeway and Tree, with jagged lines shaping the composition, giving dynamic energy to the bare outlines of a young tree and to the boundaries of sea, land and sky. He gives the image further power by working on a small, compressed scale, and by distilling his palette to a few key colors.

We have deliberately chosen to violate the chronology of this exhibition with two of John Marin's works. Lake and Mountain is like a prophecy that foretells the coming of Modernism as surely as distant thunder signals an impending storm. New York Series A, done in 1953, the last year of Marin's life, puts the final punctuation mark on the movement. It is more abstract than virtually all of the hundreds of New York City drawings he completed. It too foretells a new era, or perhaps the end of an old one, the Modern world so fundamentally changed by the economic upheaval of the Depression and two wars. Modernism had yielded to modern art, and the stubborn, inevitable passing of time and fashion.

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