ARTS
Page 6
Thursday, September 18, 1980
The Michigan Daily
'U' MUSEUM SHOW
Fumbling the French connection
By R. J. SMITH
Judging from what's included in the
University Museum's show of paintings
and drawings from the collection of the
Alex Hillman family, Hillman was
quite a collector of twentieth century
art works. The works in this show are
not meant to present a cross-section of
what the Hillman's accumulated, but
they cannot help but point out that the
late New York publishing mongul had
the knack for perceiving trends in art,
and then selecting strong works from
important artists connected with those
trends.
But of course an exemplary collection
doesn't always form the basis for a
splendid show. There are special
problems with from-the-collection
exhibits; it can be extremely difficult to
present a show unified by any sort of
scholarship when the donor has a spotty
aggregation of art works.
THIS IS THE problem with "Modern
Masters: Selections from the Collection
of the Alex Hillman 'Family Foun-
dation", currently at out museum. The
theme that links most of these works is
that, spare the impressionist paintings
and drawings, all have been influenced
by the revolution in perspective
ushered in by Cezanne. Now that's a
stunner! It's a slug-line that could be
slapped onto god knows how many
clusters of European art from the time
of Cezanne to 1950 or so (and, sadly, has
been).
So, what we have is a grab-bag
presentation of some of the top artists
associated with the "School of Paris,"
in all its incarnations from im-
pressionism to cubists. It calls for a
Jerry Brown-like reduction of expec-
tations; but, as such casual shows go,
this one hits the mark a goodly amount
of times.
Matisse's L'Ananas is a seceptively
placid oil painting, one which merges
muted but muscular forms, folding in
around the pineapple that is the pain-
ting's subject. The more one looks at it
the more one feels as if one is calmly
strolling into a full-force gale. Several
other Matisse works here are also
stellar. although a drawing from the
1940s indicates that his unique line was
not all that it once was.
ANOTHER OF the famous fauves,
Derain, is represented by an oil pain-
ting that is in many ways the antithesis
of the Matisse. At first, his Head of a
Girl from 1924 commands almost no
notice; it is painted with a rather con-
servative palate and is one of the
smallest works in the exhibit. But there
is something very biting about the girl's
face, something that is revealded only
very slowly. It is the face of a woman
frightened into silence, one which
seems to belong to a member of the
growing ranks of middle-class
European women Jean Rhys wrote
about.
The show makes a half-hearted effort
to display that the innovations created
bt Cezanne, specifically the approaches
he employed to transfer the existence of
objects onto the two-dimensional pic-
ture plane, culminated during the
cubist epoch. The Picassos on display
fail to do more than take trifling stabs
at this, however, and although one of
them is an especially famous image,
they are far from among his most ex-
citing work.
The presence of the quintet of
Picassos fails to obscure, however, the
other cubist works, all of which are
more interesting. Most exciting of all is
Gris' Harlequin with a Guitar, an
exhausting, vibrant sample of Gris'
synthetic cubism.
Just what all this has to do with
Cezanne, though, is not as clear as
those who set up this show seem to*
think. An exhibit which says there is an
important connection between Cezanne
and artists as diverse as de Chirico,
Braque, Dufy and Leger and then
leaves it at that hasn't got much to say.
That can do nothing to take away from
what these works have to give, of cour-
se, but even with images and artists so
familiar, a feeble theme can be less
pleasing than no theme at all.
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Henri Matisse's L'Ananas, painted in 1948 by the French fauvist, is one of the
26 works on display as part of the University museum's exhibition of pain-
tings and drawings from the collection of the Alex Hillman family. The show
will be at the museum until December 14.
Join the Arts staff
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