Although this abstract composition, Synchromy No. 3 (1917), bears many traces of European Cubism — angular shapes, fragmented forms, and multiple perspectives — it asserts the primacy of color as a key component of space and form. In 1912, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, together with the painter Morgan Russell, coined the term Synchromism to describe abstract compositions primarily concerned with the rhythmic use of color — a phenomenon they likened to a symphony’s use of sound. Synchromism was one of many diverse approaches to abstraction that flourished in the Americas and Europe on the 1910s, radically departing from traditional vocabularies of painting and sculpture
Born in New York to German American musicians, Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871 – 1956) travelled to Germany in 1887, and remained in Europe for several years to study art. While in Paris, he encountered Cubism and embraced its rationality and abstraction of form and space. “Cubism is a synthesis,” the painter explained, “but it may be degraded into mechanism. My Cubism is visionary, not physical.” Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lyonel Charles Feininger, Lehnstedt→
In 1910, Manierre Dawson (1887-1969) spent six months traveling throughout England, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where he visited museums, collectors and archeological sites. Following this sojourn, he created a series of works in 1911 – 12 based on images from classical art and Old Master paintings. With Meeting (The Three Graces), (1912) he reinterprets the mythological subject of the Three Graces by painting in a manner from both Cubism and Italian Futurism. Although Dawson did not receive much recognition during his lifetime, his avant-garde work was at the forefront of American art at the time.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
American artist Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936) painted Objects on a Table (1920-21) in France, where he lived from 1904 to 1936. This still life depicts cut fruit, a glass with a straw, block-like shapes, and an architectural column with clean lines, geometric clarity, and cool tonalities. The painting exudes a rational stillness, especially when compared to Cubist still lifes by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In fact, Objects on a Table marks a deliberate and profound departure from Cubism, which gained negative associations during World War I because its fragmentation of form appeared to visualize the conflict’s deadly destruction.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
The strong three-dimensionality of the biomorphic and geometric forms in this composition makes them appear animated within a space bounded by color zones. Charles Biederman (1906 – 2004) had been experimenting with styles of European modernism since 1930 and had gravitated toward greater abstraction after seeing the work of Cubist artists, newly on view in New York. He painted this untitled work while living in Paris in 1936, under the fresh influences of surrealists Joan Miro and Fernand Leger, who preferred strange or oddly combined forms that were both unsettling and humorous.
Charles Biederman died at home in 2004 at the age of 98. His estate was given to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, which has organized traveling exhibitions of Biederman’s work
