A New Way Of Seeing Modern Art In America
Show Takes Us Beyond The Stars -- and the Men

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 22, 2006; Page N01

You're not likely to come across a more engrossing, enchanting exhibition than "The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America," which opened last weekend at the Phillips Collection. It presents one of the most important and innovative American art collections from the first half of the 20th century.

It includes landmark pieces by famous pioneers of modern art. "Improvisation No. 7 (Storm)," a stunning study in color and emotion painted by Wassily Kandinsky in 1910, is one of the earliest abstractions in Western art. "Somersault," from 1924, was the first painting by Joan Miro seen in this country. "Tu m'," of 1918, was the last canvas painted by Marcel Duchamp before he switched to a purely conceptual approach to making art.

Fine work, all of it. But it's not what makes this exhibition such a thrill. That depends on objects by dozens of artists that almost nobody, even the experts, would know.

David Kakabadze, anyone? He was a Georgian artist whom his government, briefly independent from its Russian neighbors, had sent to train in Paris in 1919. Judging from his one work in this show, he must have done a lot of self-teaching. "Z (The Speared Fish)" is as strange a sculpture as you're likely to see. It's shaped rather like the top end of a double bass, with a pink and red finish that looks airbrushed, two glass baubles set into its sides and a thin metal rod sticking straight through its middle. Kakabadze is hardly the missing link of modern art, but his art makes for a fascinating twist. (A sad postscript: When he returned home in 1927, Georgia's Soviet overlords had banned such almost-abstract work, so Kakabadze turned to painting realistic cityscapes. In 1948 his early background in modern art lost him his teaching job, and he died four years later.)

How about John Covert? He was a pioneer of modern art in this country, but in 1923 he gave up the starving-artist life to work as a salesman for the family business, the Vesuvius Crucible Co. of Pittsburgh. There are two of Covert's wonderful abstract constructions in this show, in which he glued cords and dowels onto his pictures' surfaces. They're nothing much like all the other art around him in Manhattan at the time. (There are hints of Duchamp's pictures of coffee mills and chocolate grinders in these works, but reduced by Covert to their abstract essence. Now there's a strange artistic move for you.)

And then there's Frenchwoman Suzanne Phocas, a consummate art world insider who made what looked like naive outsider work. And the Austrian Erika Giovanna Klien, who made elegant futuro-cubist work with a uniquely decorative spin. And Marthe Donas, a Belgian cubist on the Paris scene who collaged fabrics in her work, like a seamstress turned to making art. And Russian painter Nadezhda Udaltsova, who, in the one year she spent in Paris beginning in 1912, mastered cubism and then made it her own. And -- most especially -- there's Stefi Kiesler, yet another almost unknown woman artist, this time from Austria. She made abstract compositions in red and black composed entirely of typewritten characters.

The Phillips show corrects the usual impression that the women of the avant-garde were busy cooking while their men did art history's heavy lifting. The women were there, and active on the scene. It's just that, until a show like this comes along to rebalance the record, there's rarely any way to recognize the work they did.

Kiesler's "Typo-Plastics," as she called them, date from the 1920s, but they'd look at home in any current show of complex postmodern art: They cross-pollinate abstraction and the everyday; language and vision; the man's work of making art and the ladylike occupations of typing and doilymaking, which Kiesler's lacy images evoke.

There's one other female artist who deserves more than a mention at this point: Katherine S. Dreier. She was a powerfully idiosyncratic modern painter, as the artworks in this exhibition demonstrate. But her biggest contribution lay in how she sponsored art by others.

The Societe Anonyme was an organization that Dreier founded and funded to encourage modern art in the United States. (She was born in 1877 into a reasonably wealthy Brooklyn family of German immigrants.) In 1920, she and Duchamp came up with the idea of an independent institution that would organize both major group exhibitions and smaller solo shows, and that would encourage all kinds of educational and scholarly events to promote the art of their time.

Man Ray, the avant-garde painter, sculptor and photographer, is usually credited as a founder, too -- the show includes several crucial works of his. But in fact he only helped dream up the name. "Societe Anonyme" means "anonymous organization" in French, but it's also the French term for a corporation. Once Dreier's institution was incorporated, its official name thus became something like "The Corporation Inc." The name mocked corporate culture -- the Societe is the ancestor of today's crop of anti-market, artist-run nonprofits -- but in its literal meaning it also insisted on a kind of democratic, ego-free evenhandedness.

The Societe began collecting in 1923. That was when Covert retired from the art world and donated four of his best works to Dreier's organization. That gift gave her an idea. She would seek out works by other artists backed by the Societe. Dreier thought of founding a museum, but in 1941 she and Duchamp started to transfer most of the collection to Yale University. That's where this show comes from.

Aside from all of its forgotten gems, the exhibition includes wonderful works by Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger and other members of the Paris avant-garde; great pieces by German dada artists including Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst; two rooms of nearly abstract lithographs by Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, who helped create modern graphic design, as well as crucial works by other Russian modernists; and whole walls or corners devoted to works by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder. (The Mondrians and Calders are included in a gallery of works the Phillips itself got from the Dreier estate, when Duchamp helped dissolve it.)

Dreier seems to have been unusually well liked by the vast range of artists she worked with, despite a weakness for both the amorphous meanderings of Theosophic spirituality and for the racist tripe of Nazism. She also was a major supporter of the most radical Bolshevik art and of its many Jewish makers. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson claimed, Dreier's mind was clearly large enough to entertain almost any proposition and its polar opposite.

In fact, in her collecting at least, she turned eclecticism and inconsistency into the highest of principles. In 1950, when Dreier and Duchamp finally dissolved the Societe and Yale published a catalogue of the collection -- by then counting more than 1,000 works -- a curator described the principles behind it. They weren't, he said, about trying to pick out the masterpieces of the future. Or about "the temporary eminence" of a few fashionable artists or "a sequence of familiar figures carefully arranged to provide an historical survey of modern art." "This," he said, getting it exactly right , "is modern art, in the sense that here are the issues and the personalities who made it."

Dreier's open embrace didn't win her the recognition she might have got from plugging for a single notion of what modern art should be. Until the current exhibition, the Societe's work has always been overshadowed by the narrower, more rigorous ideas and canon promoted by the Museum of Modern Art, founded almost a decade later. A few years before Dreier's death in 1952, MoMA's founders did admit -- "as our exhibitions and collections clearly show" -- that they had followed her lead.

The exhibition at the Phillips confirms the central place Dreier should have in any narrative of modern art. It proves that modernism was never a single path, with a few monuments of genius to help show us The Way. It was a lush estuary, with bends and dead ends as interesting as its most navigable channels.

'Anonyme': When Modernism Was Modern

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 27, 2006; Page WE50

There is an obvious propriety -- and a largely invisible irony -- in the appearance of "The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America" at the Phillips Collection.

Where else in Washington but at the Phillips would you expect to find an exhibition that so gloriously celebrates the early adoption and promotion of modern art by three of its pioneers? In 1920, a year before the opening of the Phillips Collection as a public museum, artist-collectors Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray formed something called the Societe Anonyme. (In a bit of linguistic dadaism, the term is the French equivalent to "Incorporated.") Intended as a kind of "experimental museum," the Societe Anonyme set about collecting and exhibiting modern art from around the world in America.

Most of what the group accrued in the next couple of decades, including work by such avant-gardists as Russian Kasimir Malevich, German Kurt Schwitters, Dutchman Piet Mondrian and German-born Frenchman Jean Arp, ultimately went to Yale University, whose art gallery organized this show. After Dreier's death in 1952, several pieces from her personal stash were offered, through her executor, Duchamp, to her friendly competitor in the field of modern art collecting, Duncan Phillips. Out of those offered, Phillips handpicked a few that, as he wrote Duchamp, "I would love to have in our collection as they are exactly what I would have eagerly bought had I seen them first."

One of them was the 1914 painting "Music," by cubist innovator Georges Braque. It's not in the "Societe Anonyme" show, nor is it in the Phillips Collection. In 1987, the museum sold it to raise money -- $3.3 million, to be exact.

Deciding to get rid of an artwork, and choosing what to get rid of, is rarely easy. In a Washington Post article published just before the sale, Phillips director Laughlin Phillips, the son of the museum's founder, referred to the situation as painful. Nevertheless, while admitting that such de-accessioning is sometimes necessary, Post critic Paul Richard opined at the time that the Phillips had decided to "part with the wrong painting."

Walking through "The Societe Anonyme" -- and among the Phillips Collection's once-radical, now-beloved Klee, Kandinsky and Calder -- one might be forgiven for thinking that the Phillips has come, retroactively, to the same conclusion.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. People looking forward -- as Dreier and Duchamp, and as Phillips once did -- rolled the dice every day they took a stand on the contemporary, untested art of their day by putting their money where their mouths were. You can feel that sense of risk and daring in the exhibition's first room, where ribbed-rubber mats line the floor and cheap paper lace doilies frame the art, in a replication of the nose-thumbing aesthetic of the Société Anonyme's first New York show.

Hindsight and foresight bump up against each other again and again here, not just in the works on view in "Societe Anonyme," whose modernism at times can feel distinctly old-fashioned, but in a small, accompanying show devoted to two sets of 1923 print portfolios by El Lissitzky, whose "futurist" innovations in graphic design now look retro. One almost has to laugh when listening to a recorded 1937 conversation with Dreier, in which she struggles to explain to radio host Anne Hard how color, devoid of all recognizable form, can be just as valid as the representational art of the past.

Of course, most of us have long since come to accept that. Even Duncan Phillips changed his mind about Braque's brand of cubism, coming to embrace what he once thought coldly cerebral.

There's lots that is quintessentially Phillipsian in this show -- the Arthur Doves, a sweet John Marin -- as well as lots that isn't. It's hard to imagine Duncan Phillips ever really cottoning to Duchamp's ready-made "In Advance of the Broken Arm" (a.k.a. "Snow Shovel").

Still, that's the whole point here. What's futuristic soon becomes merely "modern," which eventually, like everything else, gets old. No, you can't go back and change the past. But "The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America" shows us how dangerous and exciting it felt when a small group of people believed that it was witnessing a change in the course of art and set about to preserve that moment in time.