Minna Citron at GMOA

It’s the week after Thanksgiving and I’m sure we’re all either still full of turkey and sweet potato soufflé or getting geared up for the big winter break. But before we kick back and relax on the couch with movie marathons, the Georgia Museum of Art has one more exhibition starting before the holidays. “Minna Citron: The Uncharted Course from Realism to Abstraction” will open on Dec. 8 and run until March 3, 2013.

      The exhibition will showcase roughly 50 of Citron’s award-winning social realist and abstract paintings and sculptures, picked from her 60 years as an artist. The art is on loan from her granddaughter, Christiane H. Citron, and has traveled from museums in Texas, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

      Minna Citron attended the Art Students League of New York in 1928, and it was during her time there that she created her iconic genre scenes of Union Square and became a member of the 14th Street School. Citron associated with artists such as Isabel Bishop, a renowned graphic artist, and Reginald Marsh, most notable for his paintings of New York City, Coney Island and vaudeville in the 1920s and 1930s.

     Citron’s work initially started out as realist, depicting fine details in the clothes and faces of her subjects. These early works focused more on the roles of women in her satirical style, and during World War II she traveled across the country for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Program, producing some of her iconic prints based on the women who joined the U.S. Navy. After the war, she moved onto the abstract, strongly emphasizing dynamic shapes that stood out from their backgrounds. During this time she traveled to France to learn new techniques in color printing, which she brought back to the United States. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Citron experimented with collages and other aspects of three-dimensional art, even developing methods for 3D printmaking and assembly. 

Minna Citron
Cold Comfort

Minna Citron
Untitled

      Many of Citron's works hang in prestigious museums, including the Teller Gallery in New York, and GMOA owns a small abstract oil by her that hangs in its permanent collection galleries. The exhibition was organized by Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., along with Christiane Citron, and is sponsored locally by the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art. Paul Manoguerra, our chief curator and curator of American art, will serve as the in-house curator for the exhibition and will lead a tour of it Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m. We would be thrilled to see you before and during the holidays when the exhibition opens.

Ben Shahn at the GMOA

I wrote about Cy Twombly and his new work at the Louvre. As of late, I’ve been very interested in Black Mountain College and the artists this institution that thrived in the 1950s produced, and it turns out Twombly participated in the program when it was rife with brilliant minds, including Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Twombly’s break from the Minimalist, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionist wave during the ‘50s and ‘60s is quite impressive and adds a touch of independence and distinctiveness to his pieces. The same strand of artistic sovereignty resonates in the work of his fellow Black Mountain College schoolmate and art pioneer Ben Shahn. I’m interested in Shahn because, first, like Twombly, he broke away from the dominant art movements of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Second, the museum owns four of his works, all overflowing with social and political implications.

Ben Shahn was born in Kovos, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and with his mother and two siblings immigrated to the United States after his father was implicated in a scandal and exiled to Siberia. Shahn was not drawn to the the minimalist, Pop and Abstract Expressionist themes in modern art but instead became enraptured with socio-political issues and could not help but infuse his passion into his work. His paintings, drawings and prints are examples of social realism, a strand of art that depicts brutally honest subjects with the intent of unraveling social and economic injustices and truths. Social realism was especially widespread during the Great Depression, when artists like Dorothea Lange and Walt Kuhn documented the horrors of a penniless government and peoples—dirty children crying, mothers gripping their desperate children, hunger-stricken beggars, etc. Shahn won the attention of Diego Rivera in 1932, who asked him to assist in a mural in Rockefeller Center in New York City (which elicited great controversy for its depiction of Vladimir Lenin). Americans were outraged at the communist messages in the mural, and it was quickly destroyed. The government also asked Shahn to participate in making art for the New Deal, and he accompanied Lange and other photographers to document southern life during the Depression. We are incredibly lucky to have works by Shahn, and even more so to have works that illustrate such powerful scenes and events.

One work of Shahn’s the museum owns is a print of his portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., which Time magazine published on its cover in 1965.

Below, Shahn's "Sunday Morning", part of our collection

"The Clinic" , also part of our collection