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Also this issue: Poetry Commotion Visitors from Other Worlds Going, Going ! Media Frenzy War Is Hell Novel Concept Trouble in Camelot |
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April 17-23, 2003
art
 Edward Hopper, The Sheridan Theatre (1937), 17 1/8 inches by 25 1/4 inches, oil on canvas. |
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The world of stage and screen hits the canvas at PAFA.
This highly informative (and entertaining!) exhibition, organized by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, sets out to show how the burgeoning forms of popular entertainment in the first part of the 20th century -- including vaudeville, burlesque and early movies -- gave a group of highly original American artists a perfect homegrown subject with which to interpret the brash, exuberant forms and ideas of modernism. The show builds the case with artifacts such as posters, cards, photographs, models and costumes, interspersed with paintings, prints and drawings. In addition, the installation features a life-size theater marquee, a miniature movie theater with a constantly changing selection of early films and a replica of a kinetoscope, an early forerunner to movies. These popular peephole boxes would cost one penny and show a 30-second to one-minute movie. The kinetoscope on display shows the whirling dance of Ameta, a vaudeville performer, dancing and twirling gossamer fabric scarves, faster and higher, until at the end she disappears into a cone of flowing fabric.
The exhibition has some terrific early prints and paintings of theatrical themes that capture the growing excitement of early movies and popular theater. For example, in a carefully composed and crafted charcoal and wash drawing, I'm So Glad You Found Me. Oh, Take Me Away!, c. 1901, William Glackens captures a bit of turmoil in the front row of an otherwise proper turn-of-the-century theater. A dapper man reaches out toward a small girl on stage, while both are framed by the architecture of the theater and a wonderfully detailed assortment of shocked and prudish witnesses. Painted just a few years later, Robert Henri's rather risqué oil painting, Salome, 1909, shows a larger-than-life vaudeville star decked out in a belly-dancing outfit and a smoky come-hither look. Henri's sensual paint handling helped to create an image that convincingly merges a traditional biblical theme with a trendy urban look -- referring, believe it or not, to the belly-dancing craze of the first decade of the 20th century.
John Sloan's oil-on-canvas painting, Movies, 1913, captures the excitement and social dynamics of a group of people interacting in front of a brightly lit movie theater at night. He brilliantly contrasts the lush purples and browns of the darkened city and streets with the lemon yellow, pale green and pearl gray of the illuminated theater façade and people.
But some of the most interesting work is by artists who reached further for visual effects and expressed a more personal vision through their paintings of popular theater and film. Before the Grand Parade and After the Show, c. 1956, two gouache, watercolor and charcoal paintings (from the PAFA collection installed adjacent to the exhibit) by Henry C. Pitz, are wonderfully original representations of partially dressed performing artists backstage. Pitz used a collage-like surface made of fragments of colors and textures, including murky jewel tones and a blotted black wash like cigarette smoke, to offer a vision that's both ephemeral and gritty. Charles Demuth was similarly drawn to the visual splendor of the entertainment world, but his marvelous little watercolor paintings are more buoyant, and seem lit from within with ripples of light and color. In Vaudeville Musicians, 1917, two men in tails are tied at the waist and balanced weightlessly together while playing guitar and flute, and in Aviariste (Woman with Parrots), 1912, a large woman in an elegant red dress blends exuberantly into the surrounding colorful birds.
Several portrait paintings by Walt Kuhn are particularly powerful, eloquently capturing the complex characters of posing entertainers. The starkly painted Clown with Folded Arms, 1944, shows a burly acrobat with sternly folded arms and a slightly menacing expression on his white painted face, while Plumes, 1931, features a melancholy showgirl in a strapless dress and extravagant headdress. Kuhn uses stilted poses, flattened planes of color and simplified forms to create compelling images of great psychological intensity. His paintings, along with a number of other showstoppers in "On the Edge of Your Seat," use themes from the entertainment world to express the dilemmas of modern life as eloquently as any of the best modernist paintings of the early 20th century.
On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early 20th-century American Art
Through April 20, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry sts., 215-972-7600
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