THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE
[from the collection of Ruth & Margaret Sackner]
AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS
[from the collection of Patricia & Phillip Frost]
Ira Licht [preface]
Ira Licht [preface]: THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE [from the collection of Ruth & Margaret Sackner], AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS [from the collection of Patricia & Phillip Frost]. Miami: University of Miami Lowe Art Museum, 1983. First edition [2,000 copies]. Slim quarto. Printed perfect bound wrappers. 63 pp. 48 illustrations, 5 in color. Catalog of 50/95 works exhibited. Trivial wear to wrappers, but a nearly fine copy.
5.75 x 8.5 exhibition catalog with 63 pages and 46 color and black and white illustrations for an exhibition from March 10 thru April 24, 1983, featuring Russian Avant-Garde and American Abstract Art from the collections of Ruth & Margaret Sackner and Patricia & Philip Frost.
To understand Abstract Art, is in reality, the problem of understanding any and all art from a qualitative viewpoint. “Abstract” signifies a direct, untrammeled relationship of the elements of plastic expression. The abstract artist is concerned with the universal values, the real expression of art. Because it is the clearest effort to represent these values, Abstract Art is in the forefront of esthetic development.
Includes color plates by Ad Reinhardt, Ivan Kluin, Yuri Annenkov, Gertrude Greene, Werner Drewes, and black and white work from Ad Reinhardt, El Lissitzky, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Raymond Jonson, Stuart Walker, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Harry Bowden, Hannaniah Harari, Balcomb Greene, John Von Wicht, Esphyr Slobodkina, Gerome Kamrowski, Jean Xeron, Charles G. Shaw, George L. K. Morris, R. D. Turnbull, John Sennhauser, Byron Browne, Carl Holty, Alexandra Exter, Mikhail Larionov, Ivan Puni, Ivan Kluin, Alexander Bogomazov, Kiril Zdanevich, Liubov Popova, Nikolai Suetin, Natalia Goncharova, Kasimir Malevich, Ilia Chashnik, Alexandr Rodchenko, Vasily Kemensky, Ilya Zdanehvich [Iliazd], V. Kulagina-Lkucsis, Olga Rozanova, and David Burliuk
”Marvin and Ruth Sackner were first attracted to visual poetry because of its accessibility. “When you have words in the artwork you can communicate easily,” says Marvin, a retired doctor who was chief of medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in Miami Beach before his formal retirement in 1992. “It’s an extrospective kind of art rather than introspective.”
Until the mid-1970s, the couple had been collecting optical, Russian avant garde and contemporary art. The 1975 purchase of a series of prints by Tom Phillips, Ein Deutches Requiem: After Brahms, spurred their interest in works combining text, calligraphy, words and images. But it wasn’t until 1979 that Marvin climbed up on a ladder of Jaap Rietman bookstore in New York’s Soho and discovered a dusty copy of Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. “As soon as I looked through it I said, ‘Ruth, look! Our collection has a name!’ ” Marvin says.
They bought the entire long-ignored shelf of books, then trooped to two other Manhattan shops in search of books on what was called patterned or shaped poetry. Invariably, the publications had been relegated to dusty backrooms. They bought everything they found. “When we came back to Miami from that weekend, we had a mini collection,” Marvin says.
Ignoring the temptations of the artforms that previously drew their eye, the Sackners focused on artists’ books, interesting typography and other works that married verbal content with images. The result is the 75,000 works — and counting — of the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. It is the largest collection of its kind. Two other collections — one now owned by L.A’s Getty Museum, the other by the Stuttgart Museum of Art in Germany — ceased growing when their respective collectors died.” — the Miami Herald, December 2014
The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection of American Abstraction 1930-1945 was an entire private collection devoted to a single overlooked facet of 20th-century American art: the American Abstract Artists group. Active during the economic depths of the Great Depression and the international upheaval of World War II -- a period dominated by social realism and regionalists -- the group included, during its first 15 years (it continues even today), an average of about 60 abstract painters and sculptors who originally banded together in New York in 1937 out of frustration with museums and dealers who ignored their work. Their first exhibition took place that year at the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue, and annually thereafter at various locales, including the Riverside Museum, New York, and venues in San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities. Their stated goal, in addition to mutual support through meetings, lectures and discussions on various modes of abstraction: to show "all the significant abstract work done in America," with the hope of educating the public along the way.
Whether their shows achieved that ambitious goal is not clear from this show; leading abstractionist Stuart Davis, for example, seems noticeably absent. Davis, however -- by then a half-generation older -- may have helped incite younger abstractionists to organize when he implied in a catalogue for the Whitney Museum's 1935 show "Abstract Painting in America" that significant American abstraction had ended around 1927 with modernist pioneers such as Arthur Dove, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and others associated with Alfred Stieglitz.
Roundly ignored in the Whitney show, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, were a whole new generation of abstract painters and sculptors, among them Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Ad Reinhardt, Irene Rice Pereira and Louis Schanker, their numbers greatly enriched (and art often surpassed) by European emigres like Ilya Bolotowsky, Werner Drewes and Josef Albers. Later, European masters driven out by the Nazis, including Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy and Leger, exhibited with the group but did not join in other activities. Hans Hofmann, though never a member, appears to have taught at least half of the group, notably George McNeil, Giorgio Cavallon, Vaclav Vytlacil and Rosalind Bengelsdorf, all of whom are worth exploring further in the future.
The members met often, argued passionately, held lectures and panel discussions, picketed MOMA and exhibited annually, attracting large crowds and major reviews, many of which they didn't like and convincingly disagreed with in one of several good publications of their own (on view in a glass case, among other memorabilia lent chiefly by the Archives of American Art.) But passionate as they were, the pictures seem tame and acceptable today, well crafted and clearly reflective of the influence of '20s European abstraction, from the hard-edge, wholly nonobjective works of the Bauhaus and Russian constructivists to the almost expressionistic works seemingly inspired by Kandinsky, Paul Klee and -- occasionally -- surrealists.
More explorers than innovators, they had no central manifesto, no single view of abstraction, though, oddly, there was a perception of a hard-edge, nonobjective point of view, evidenced by a letter from Lyonel Feininger refusing membership in the group because, he said, he could not abandon nature, as they had. In fact, students of Hofmann had always been taught to keep in touch with nature, and American abstraction from the period seems largely to have been grounded in nature and, in the end, soft-edge and semi-abstract. It was the Europeans, overall, who were more rigorously geometric.