"ModernStarts: Places"
1999-10-28 until 2000-03-14
Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY, USA United States of America

Modern Places: The Country and The City. The industrial revolution irrevocably changed the economic patterns of both country and city as increasing numbers of rural workers left home to seek employment in factories. The uncontrolled growth and expansion of the city, driven by technological development and the radical change in living conditions, initially inspired an anti-urban sentiment among artists and the portrayal of nature was used to counter the spiritual degradation of urban life ruled by mechanization and materialism. The escapism and unease that characterized art at the close of the nineteenth century gradually gave way to a productive struggle to find an appropriate way of artistically shaping the experience of the city and to embrace all the particularities of modern life.

Landscape painting between 1880 and 1920 ranged from idealized and allegorical depictions of nature, as seen in the early paintings of Henri Matisse and André Derain, to the haunting psychological landscapes by Edvard Munch. The search for an authentic rural culture determined Paul Gauguin's interest in the exotic and was at the center of the radical call for a return to nature proclaimed by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein. In contrast, artists such as Claude Monet, Paul Signac, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque appropriated the primal landscape by increasingly abstracted but fairly straightforward renderings of concrete topographical motifs.

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