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Exhibit highlights modern art

November 9, 2006 1:25 am

By SHEILA WICKOUSKI

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Marcel Duchamp, the great Dada artist who loved to play with identity, might have enjoyed it if Katherine Drier, his cohort in modern art, had appeared on one of those popular 1950s television panel shows like "I've Got a Secret." Nobody would have guessed that this less-than-stunning woman was indeed the doyenne of the modern art movement in America or predict that her vision and forceful personality would reach across continents and influence art education into the next century.

This was, of course, no secret but simply something that was of little interest to the American public, which had a disparaging opinion of the contemporary art scene.

Together with Duchamp and Man Ray, Drier had formed the collective "experimental museum of art," known as the Societe Anonyme. From 1920 until 1950, when it dissolved, the Societe Anonyme sought, through exhibitions and educational events, to change public opinion.

Its members amassed an impressive collection representative of the best in modern art at the time, which Drier catalogued before the works began to be dispersed, with the bulk of the collection going to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941.

There is, as one might expect in any major collection of modern art in America, a key link to Duncan Phillips. While Phillips focused on the French school and Drier on the German and Russian avant-garde, they nevertheless shared their art finds and their appreciation of them.

So, it is most fitting that The Phillips Collection in Washington be a key venue for a historic once-in-a-lifetime tour of selected works from this stellar collection.

Included in "The Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America," a show of more than 130 rarely seen works selected from the Drier collection, are pieces unique to the Phillips.

As one would expect, included in the show are the works of the 20th-century masters: Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Fernand Leger. But the work of many unknowns--artists like David Burliuk and Carl Buchheister--also is part of the treasury of experimental art.

The collection is truly about the relationships among these artists as recounted in the history of the Societe Anonyme.

A re-creation of the inaugural 1920 exhibit is complete with Duchamp's whimsical touches of doily-covered frames and industrial gray rubber floor covering.

Included is Duchamp's "To Be Looked at (From the Other Side of the Glass) With One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour." It's a facsimile because the original was too fragile to travel from Yale.

If you thought Duchamp was making fun of Leonardo da Vinci with his mustachioed "Mona Lisa," this work clearly pays homage to da Vinci's fascination with optics.

Here also are Frank Stella's dark geometric work "Brooklyn Bridge" and Man Ray's famous "Lampshade."

The selections from the Societe Anonyme's one-person exhibitions range from Kandinsky's abstracts to Louis Michel Eilshemius' landscapes. Heinrich Campendonk's work simmers between the abstract and realism. Also here is "The White Heron," an early Stella work that is more lighthearted and lyrical than his later pieces.

Drier's intent was to bring the works of small galleries into the big museums. Here the world--America especially--could see the importance of modern art as a way of expressing the relationship of the individual to the modern world community.

Once upon a time it was known to only a few visionary collectors, who left us this rich legacy.