Embodied Seeing: Modernist Works on Paper 1890-1962

This exhibition considers the astonishing range of artistic practice in the modernist period in Europe. The focus is on a group of works on paper that survey modernist art from the first printed illustration of Paul Gaugin's work in 1889 to a 1970 lithograph by Joan Miró. The works chosen represent most of the major moments of modern art: Symbolism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism. Here one can imagine these moments in all the richness and complexity of their modes of production. The exhibition includes drawings, linocuts, lithographs, books, and photographs by many of the most significant artists of the period. Although these works have been overshadowed in recent decades by their better known paintings, they were originally conceived together with the paintings as part of larger artistic projects.

Three extraordinary illustrated books by Pierre Bonnard, spanning the whole of his career, are included as is an ambitious volume of poems illustrated by his friend Henri Matisse. Highly expressive and lyrical works by Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee serve as an introduction to the later production of their colleagues at the Bauhaus—Andor Weininger, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and Walter Gropius. A collection of Dada and Surrealist books and magazines offers a glimpse into the depth and complexity of literary and illustrative material that define that particular current. A selection of gripping photographs by the Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko and lithographs by the master Pablo Picasso are among the highlights of this exhibition.

It is the special character of works on paper that they are scaled to the human body. Woodcuts, lithographs, drawings, and printed books address their users differently than works of painting, sculpture, and cinema. The works of art exhibited here are not meant to be viewed or read in traditional ways. They at once solicit many of the feelings associated with the intimacy of reading and frustrate any effort to approach them as texts to be read or stories to be told. We look at these works, we see them, and we respond to them as visual phenomena of a highly sophisticated order.

The works exhibited here are paired with a minimum of critical or cultural commentary. This decision was dictated by the intentions of the artists. All of them desired their work to be seen, understood, and felt in terms of its visual potency. By appealing first to a knowing eye, rather than a reading mind, these artists aimed to make visual experience equivalent to, or perhaps more powerful than, spoken or written means of understanding. These works have been selected from both the Museum's collection and that of the University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library.