Make It New: Modernist Paintings, 1930-1975

"Make it new"—more than a call to aesthetic innovation, Ezra Pound's modernist dictum carried the weight of an ethical imperative. Emerging as a response to the economic and technological revolutions that had torn asunder old social relations, the modernist sought an art form that could respond in equal measure to the times. Thus, the call to bury old artistic formulas in favor of aesthetic experimentation and innovative techniques was understood as an appeal to more deeply and authentically grapple with the experience of an ever-mutable modernity. 

Make it New: Modernist Paintings, 1930 – 1975 presents work by both international and local artists that took up modernism's gauntlet and sought formal experimentation as a primary goal. These artists actively engaged the liminal possibilities of the pictorial medium to expand its expressive potential. 

The exhibition encompasses many different artistic movements that fall broadly under the umbrella term 'Modernism.' The roots of Modernism itself trace back to the 19^th century when artists began to deviate from the strict confines of realism, but its tenets became boldly prominent in the early half of the following century and carried onwards. Make It New explores the various facets of Modern art, as works pivoted away from the representational toward the surreal and abstract, and subsequently branched forward into a myriad of other correlated genres. 

Featuring works by Milton Avery, Herbert Barnett, Jason Berger, Henry Botkin, Ted Davis, Werner Drewes, Ruth Eckstein, Jacob Kainen, Henry Koerner, Lawrence Kupferman, Sally Michel, Raymond Moisset, Robert S. Neuman, and Ben Norris, among others, Make It New pulls from Childs Gallery's extensive inventory, presenting an array of artists who pushed the boundaries of what painting meant and what a painting could be, during several decades of dynamic restructuring for Western society. 

The work of Herbert Barnett, for example, draws from the formal innovations pioneered by Picasso and Braque's Cubist experimentations. From these works can be traced an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques that sought to open up the formal limits of painting. Sally Michel took up Matisse's flat, expansive color plains and Lawrence Kupferman, in a radical withdrawal of authorial intent that would foreshadow things to come, experimented with pouring paint directly on to the picture surface in order to allow the pigment to freely find its own path. 

Make It New: Modernist Paintings, 1930-1975 is on view at Childs Gallery March 16 through May 13, 2023.