Get the latest gossip
The Met’s Tremendous Harlem Renaissance Show Redefines Modernism
Jerry Saltz says we’ve gotten everything wrong about the big bang of 20th century art.
There are incredible portraits by Elizabeth Catlett, including the quasi-Cubist Head of a Woman, and Laura Wheeler Waring, whose Girl With Pomegranate is an exercise in profuse color and quiet sensuality. And then there is Romare Bearden’s multi-panel work The Block, a street scene packed with everything from a coffin-bearing procession to façades festooned with collaged posters that peer out from the buildings like windows into the city’s soul. Modernism dissolved old forms while restoring a connection to a past that had been sundered by technological revolutions and social disruptions — breathing life into the grand tradition of art by, as Ezra Pound put it, making it new.
Or read this on VULTURE