"American Modern".

"American Modern" at Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco. February 3-April 3, 2005

The surprise of "American Modern" comes in large part from Hackett Freedman's interpretation of its own grand title. All dating from between 1907 and 1942, these paintings, sculptures, and works on paper make the case for a period of advanced American art before Abstract Expressionism claimed the mantle of modernism for its own.

The artists of America's first modern generation worked to assimilate lessons from the School of Paris and blend them with their nativist intuitions. Take the case of John Marin, whose Landscape (1914) stands out as one of the stunnners of the show. The jazzily askew reds and yellows call to mind the Fauvist palette that enthralled Maria from the day in 1910 when he first visited the Steiglitz Gallery. But they also register his motif." they work to portray the sun refracted through clouds off the Maine coast near Mount Desert Island. In another painter, such a coupling of European Modernism and Emersonian naturalism might not appear so seamless. Certainly, some of Maria's own pictures fail. His signature style substitutes at times for felt texture. But even those weaker pieces reveal a painter who never allowed an aesthetic program to squelch his own emotion. And in his best pictures, such as Landscape, Marin's slanted and squiggled brush stroke and his love of the American topos are part and parcel of the same unified urge.

This weave of past and present seems standard fare for all of Michael Hackett's savvy selections, with works by Marsden Hartley, Smart Davis, John Graham, Elie Nadelman, and Gaston Lachaise. It's impossible merely to wander past their works: they exert a magnetic pull.

But the paintings which form the center of this exhibition are three by Milton Avery. With their simple curvilinear shapes and whimsical distortions, Avery's portraits and landscapes manage to convey a cool depth. Chief among these is Outdoor Painter from 1949, the beginning of the artist's late period. The picture has all the lightness of a summer afternoon: a woman reclines on the grass in the center while the painter gazes toward her from beside his easel in the lower right. Stare at the picture for a few minutes, though, and this pleasant scene becomes a fugal play of color. The yellow of the painter's shirt and the woman's straw hat pop out from the green and ochre grass, while the lavendar sky pushes down on the muted green trees that loom up from the background. The fields of color have a life all their own. Such moments of singular starkness occur often in Avery. They seem to create a feeling perhaps best described by Wallace Stevens's great phrase: "so far beyond the casual solitudes."

Following last year's exhibition at the Phillips Collection and the recent show of Avery's seascapes at Knoedler, the painter seems to be riding a resurgent wave. The Hackett Freedman exhibition both adds to that excitement and suggests an explanation for its rise: by exhibiting these works on their own, the show suggests that the best work of early American modernism cannot be seen merely as a prelude. This remains a more audacious statement than it may sound. Even sixty-five years after Clement Greenberg's first volleys in Partisan Review, it seems hard to shake off the notion that pure abstraction was the teleological project of American Modernism, next to which any modern figural work must appear secondary at best.

Greenberg himself acknowledged Avery's great talents. And with the show at Hackett Freedman, we can now see how well those talents, and those of his best contemporaries, have endured.