Mid-Century American Abstraction: Master Works on Paper

September 13 – December 7, 2003

Around 1940, as avant-garde art and artists increasingly flooded into the United States from war-torn Europe, American artists forged a new movement: Abstract Expressionism.

This exhibition of eleven master drawings, watercolors, and collages looked at this critical period in the adoption of European modernist styles and subjects and their transformation into a new aesthetic free of traditional landscape, still life, or figural images. Also called The New York School, this artistic movement dominated the American art scene though much of the 1950s. Included in the show were works by the painters Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Tobey, and German émigré Hans Hoffman, and the sculptors Theodore Roszak and David Smith, among other artists working in New York City and elsewhere in the country during this decisive period. Drawn entirely from the Smart Museum's collection and featuring recent donations from the collection of Janice and Henri Lazarof, this intimate exhibition explored the stimulus of pre-World War II European modernism, especially German Expressionism and French Surrealism, and other sources including Asian art and philosophy on this fecund artistic activity.