Art’s finest ‘isms’

Paul Saitowitz

Intertwined among the white buildings, white traffic lights and wide,

sparsely populated streets of Newport Beach lies a varied exhibition

of 20th century world-class art surprisingly contrary to its

surroundings.

A mixed bag of brilliant images -- colorful and bland --are

conveyed through modernism, surrealism and cubism by the likes of

Pollock, Picasso, Dali, O’Keeffe, Matisse and more. The works will be

on display at the Orange County Museum of Art through April 25, as

part of the Modern Masterpieces exhibit.

Fifty-nine pieces are on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum

of Art -- the oldest art museum in the country -- in Hartford, Conn.

The breadth of the paintings on the wall have drawn people all of

Southern California, and schools have been touring the exhibition

since it opened.

“We secured this exhibit a year ago, and it has had the greatest

response of anything we’ve had here in the past five years,” curator

Sarah Vure said. “We hope this will help us get other important

exhibits in the future.”

The standout works include “Ostrich-Feather Hat” by Matisse;

“Apparition of the Face Fruit Dish on a Beach,” by Salvador Dali;

“Women of Algier’s,” by Pablo Picasso; and “Lawrence Tree,” by

Georgia O’Keeffe.

The common thread among all the artists represented in the

exhibition is rebellion against the norm. They were searching for new

ways to express what they were seeing in everyday life as well as

politics.

Artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko approached art from a

different vantage point, choosing to use color and shape to convey

their emotions rather than depicting images.

“Those artists were into experimenting with unconscious,” Vure

said. “A lot of it was a way to show democracy versus totalitarianism

by simplifying the subject to evoke emotion.”

There are five Picasso works on display representing the roots of

Cubism.

“Picasso was the first person to give you a different perspective

of something rather than just seeing it from the vantage point of

looking through a window,” Vure said.

Surrealism was derived from the psychoanalytical theories of

Sigmund Freud and focused on finding pathways to the unconscious.

Dali was one of the leaders of this movement, and he embraced the

surreal by depicting the world he lived in through paintings filled

with an amalgamation of images brought together to represent a larger

image.

“Apparition of the Face Fruit Dish on a Beach” combines everything

from the profile of a dog, to a vase and a lifeless body, to show the

image of a face on the shore surrounded by cliffs.

The vast array of art, which is headed to a museum in Texas after

its stay in Newport, was not easy to set up for display within the

gallery.

“We tried to put it together chronologically and at the same time

tell a story,” Vure said.

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.