One of the more significant contributions an exhibition of historic art can make is to the understanding of human cultural development. While some shows are simply blockbusters selected to draw crowds -- basically art as entertainment -- museums of quality employ curators who combine scholarly research and knowledge of the organization's collection to present new ways of thinking about the past.
An exhibition with noteworthy content will speak to what the imagery reveals about the period and place the art was created within.
Such is the case with "Abstract Art before 1950: Watercolors, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs," at Carnegie Museum of Art, which initiates a broad conversation about the early years of abstraction by including photography and prints by Japanese artists.
Amanda Zehnder, Carnegie assistant curator of fine arts, thus pushes considerations past media more typically seen in historic exhibitions and beyond the Western cultural lineage favored, until recently, in most art history texts and classes.
Among the more than 80 works, expression by seminal figures such as Arthur Dove, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock and Rothko confirms that artists were surpassing conventions of composition and other boundaries.
It also becomes evident, when comparing artists -- say, Picasso and Georges Braque -- that particular aesthetics or concepts (Cubism) were not initially the property of any one person.
More interestingly, the photographs of Ansel Adams, Luke Swank and Edward Weston show that fine artists weren't the only ones looking at their surroundings anew.
A "Wooden Tower" becomes a design element through Swank's early 1930s lens, while Adams and Weston found harmony and beauty in the repeating curves of nature.
The fourth exhibited photographer, Barbara Morgan, known for her images of dancers, catches light in motion and abstracts dance if not the figure itself. The squiggles of her "Emanation" may, a gallery label points out, also form a pun on the word "photography," which means "writing with light."
By including works by such Japanese artists as Onchi Koshiro, leader of the "creative prints" woodblock movement, Zehnder shows that this visual experimentation wasn't limited to the West, while making use of the museum's fine James B. Austin collection.
Abstraction was a hard sell in its infancy but is now commonplace, even tranquil compared to the new artforms found across the hall in the 2008 Carnegie International. Some of the "Abstract Art" artists exhibited in earlier Internationals, and it's not difficult to imagine a future exhibition with works on paper by CI08 artists.
"Abstract" continues through Oct. 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, and until 8 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $15, seniors $12, students/children $11, children under 3 and members free. Information: 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org.
A polished exhibition at Concept Art Gallery demonstrates some of the points Zehnder makes in the Carnegie exhibition, as well as that abstract painting is alive and well.
"Fabrizio Gerbino: Beyond the Object" comprises recent paintings by the Florentine artist, now residing in Pittsburgh. While the 22 paintings vary in composition and size, they're united by a mostly gray/green palette, painterly expression and intense scrutiny of the pulse of even inanimate objects.
As with the artists in the Carnegie show, objects are more departure point than subject. Frequently they are unknowable, shapes that suggest but don't reveal, such as a top-like form that's become part of Gerbino's personal iconography.
When recognizable, they remain inscrutable, like ambiguous empty frames that conjure the absent and the possible, seem to ask what of life is disclosed and what's hidden, that suggest memory, perpetual and ephemeral.
Floating in vast expanses of complexly layered, if nearly monochromatic paint, they are metaphoric for spirit or mind.
The repeating sensual forms of a large "Untitled" work, 84 inches high, call to mind a dunescape somewhat like the Carnegie's Weston; but Gerbino's chiseled inspiration was a found object, magnified on canvas.
Under Gerbino's brush, these stationary, often mundane, markers become mysterious receptacles, expressions of the artist's psyche and codified reflections of our own time and place.
An artist's reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Saturday (free and public). "Beyond" continues through Sept. 27 at 1031 S. Braddock Ave., Regent Square. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, and until 8 p.m. Thursday. Information: 412-242-9200 or www.conceptgallery.com.
Diane Samuels' "Mapping Sampsonia," the conscientious exploration of the North Side Mexican War Street the artist shares with the Mattress Factory and which debuted at that museum, opens with a 6-8 p.m. reception Oct. 11 at the Kim Foster Gallery, 529 W. 20th St., New York, continuing through Nov. 15 (1-212-229-0044).
First Published: September 10, 2008, 8:00 a.m.
