Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism February 27 – June 13, 2021
“Extra Ordinary” surveys a range of American artists who embraced realism, representation and classical artistic techniques in the face of the rising tide of abstraction at mid-century.
Through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity and an uncanny as- semblage of ordinary things, their works not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life. The exhibition takes as its point of depar- ture the 1943 show “American Realists and Magic Realists” at the Museum of Modern Art — when the term “magic realism” entered the American art historical lexicon — and will feature a suite of paintings originally included in MoMA’s show. By bringing together significant works by Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood, Jared French, Henry Koerner, George Tooker and John Wilde, along with a number of lesser known artists, “Extra Ordinary” reveals the slippery task of categorizing this eccentric group of painters into a single style. After all, the canon of artists we now identify as “magic realists” was codified through a series of exhibitions organized by curators Alfred H. Barr, Dorothy C. Miller and Lincoln Kirstein, among others. “Extra Ordinary” also emphasizes, in critic Clement Greenberg’s words, “the extreme eclecticism now prevailing” in the American art world during this period. In so doing, it highlights a wid- er constellation of artists — including such women as Gertrude Abercrombie and Honoré Sharrer, such artists of color as Eldzier Cortor and Hughie Lee-Smith, and other artists from farther-flung regions such as Everett Spruce and Patrick Sullivan — who also
turned to the mysterious, supernatural and hyperreal to examine key social issues including the dignity of the working class, wartime trauma and environmental concerns. These artists embraced magic or fantasy not as a means to escape everyday reality but as a way to engage more directly with it.
Curator: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art
(top) Brian Connelly, “A Night Garden,” 1955. Oil and casein on panel, 18 × 30 inches. The Schoen Collection: Magic Realism. Image courtesy of Debra Force Fine Art. (right) George Ault, “Black Night: Russell’s Corners,” 1943. Oil on canvas, 18 × 24 1/16 inches. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John Lambert Fund, 1946.3.
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