1900: Art at the Crossroads - Brief Article

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON

Of course it might only be a coincidence that Ruskin died in 1900, the same year that Freud published his most famous book, but the spell cast by round numbers remains powerful nonetheless, bewitching us into believing that a new century opens Up fresh possibilities for art and thought while letting old formulas sink gently into oblivion. At the dawn of the new millennium, Robert Rosenblum, the art historian, critic, and Guggenheim curator, characteristically looks forward by looking backward. "1900: Art at the Crossroads," an exhibition of 250 paintings and sculptures (curated by Rosenblum with Mary Anne Stevens, Norman Rosenthal, Ann Dumas, and Vivien Greene) opening at London's Royal Academy of Arts in mid-January, takes a fresh look at the art that was produced in the years immediately before and after the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the largest the international shows staged at the turn of the last century. Works today generally understood as canonical will be juxtaposed with those of erstwhile "official" artists (from more than twenty countries), all well known a century ago but now largely discounted, if not forgotten. Inevitably, this revisioning will lead to speculation about today's international surveys: Which of the artists sure to dominate the great international exhibitions in the year 2000 will be seen as canonical a century from now--and which will Vanish from memory?

Is art history written once and for all, the show seems to ask, or could we still come to appreciate in a new way both the now-forgotten and the now-canonical artists that "1900" stirs in the same pot? "Are there ways of seeing oil-and-water contemporaries like Bouguereau and Cezanne that might bridge the gulf between them?" Rosenblum asks in the catalogue. To create encounters between thematically related works, the exhibition is organized into sections that explore grand issues like nationalism, modern technology, fairy tale and dream, arcadian nostalgia, and new research into psychology.

One such theme, the magnetic attraction of the sexes and the equally strong opposition between them, was a fin-de-siecle obsession, Rosenblum observes. The female body was either sexualized, as in Gustav Klimt's mythological femmes fatales, or raised to a supernatural level, as in the reincarnations of the Virgin a la Bouguereau. An increasing number of male nudes also began to crop up in late-nineteenth-century genre paintings. The pederastic fantasies staged in some of these images--Henry Scott Tuke's or Peder Severin Kroyer's pictures, for example--were probably not as evidently prurient then as they are now. Our ways of making art have changed dramatically over the years, but, as this show amply demonstrates, so too have our ways of seeing. Gangway for Ignacio Zuloaga, Aurelia de Sousa, Angelo Morbelli, Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro ...

"1900: Art at the Crossroads" was co-organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where it will be on view from January 16 to April 3, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where it can be seen from May 19 to September 13.

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