Anonyme

Yale & the Hammer hit a Modernist jackpot

Comments (0) By Doug Harvey Wednesday, May 3 2006

...continued from page 1

So it goes for the rest of the 240-odd selections in the exhibition — from the works included in the enormous “International Exhibition of Modern Art” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 to the considerable number of acquisitions added to the collection after its bequeathal to Yale. For every strong, surprising work by a famous artist — Picabia’s amazing macaroni, snakeskin and ostrich feather 1926 landscape Midi (Promenade des anglais), Kurt Schwitter’s colorful wooden Merz assemblages Oval Construction (1925) and Relief With Red Segment (1927), Brancusi’s magnificent Yellow Bird (1919), Duchamp’s still-challenging final painting, T um’ (1918 — and designed to fit exactly over Dreier’s home-library bookshelf) — there are two or three stellar pieces by artists you’ve never heard of. Although the majority of the artists are American, French, Russian or German, participants from as far off as Iceland and Uruguay are included, as well as a relatively generous complement of women.

Indeed, sexism undoubtedly played a considerable role in the disremembering of the Société Anonyme’s legacy up until now. Most mainstream accounts of Dreier have depicted her as an overbearing avant-garde dowager groupie — with no mention of her art practice and usually nothing about her tireless organizational activities; she was just some wealthy dilettante who happened to have owned Duchamp’s masterpiece The Large Glass for a period of time. In fact, Dreier came from a family of dedicated progressives; she devoted considerable effort to the Women’s Trade Union work of her sisters Margaret and Mary before deciding to pursue her own vision of social transformation through the spiritual impact (Theosophist, in her case) of modern art. While “The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America” provides considerable restoration to Dreier’s role in this country’s early avant-garde community, and particularly her relationship with Duchamp, it’s more than a little telling that this rehabilitation should occur under the auspices of the very kind of well-endowed institution the S.A. was designed to supplant. But that just adds further poignancy and irony to an already rich and almost forgotten chapter in art history. As a history lesson, as a spectacular collection of mostly unheralded treasures of modern art, and as a model of possible collective action for today’s communities of artists, the exhibit is beyond reproach.