'Villa America' exhibit covers landscape of modern art

SAN ANTONIO -- Almost as if the Whitney Museum of American Art dropped in for a visit, "Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950" provides a spectacular survey of this country's early modernists drawn from an outstanding private collection making its first national tour.

The show is packed with big names, ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Philip Guston, but it's light on abstraction, instead favoring the figure, landscapes, urban scenes and artists' self-portraits -- illuminating the nation's daily life in the early 20th century.

On view through June 4 at the McNay Art Museum here, "Villa America" reflects the eye of collector Myron Kunin, the former head of the Regis Corp., a hair-products company that owns Supercuts.

Though he was reluctant to take over his father's business, Kunin, who began collecting in the 1970s, used the resources it provided to fill the walls in the company's ever-expanding offices with an art collection that would be the envy of any American museum. The entire collection numbers more than 500 paintings, which hang in the company's seven-story corporate headquarters in Minnesota.

"I like things that just grab me," Kunin said while visiting San Antonio for the exhibit's opening. "Everybody tells me to stop buying, but I can't

-- it's my drug. I'm addicted. Personally, I don't understand why more people don't collect. But I tend to like things that are out of fashion."

The chief curator for "Villa America" is Elizabeth Armstrong, who got to know Kunin's collection while she was working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Now she's the chief curator for Southern California's Orange County Museum of Art, where this exhibit debuted last June.

"Since Myron had so much interest in artists who are not an accepted part of the canon, his collection tells a much more diverse story of American art,"

Armstrong said. "If you look at the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection now, it doesn't tell the story of what was happening during the '30s and '40s. While Myron prefers the representational, I think you can see he likes artists who pushed realism as close to abstraction as possible."

O'Keeffe is a prime example. Among the most unusual paintings in the show is her "Green-Grey Abstraction" (1931), which is hung vertically and vaguely suggests the back view of a nude. But turn the painting into the horizontal position and it transforms into an aerial view of Lake George in upstate New York.

O'Keeffe's large "Cross With Red Heart" reflects her experiences in New Mexico, with a large cross outlined against a blue sky. A red Milagros heart is suspended on the cross, which also has a rooster wind vane on top. With the intensity of an El Greco, it is one of the most overtly religious paintings in the exhibit.

Kunin said that if pressed to pick his favorite painting, he would probably select Philip Evergood's "Madonna of the Mines" (1932). With a crossbeam suggesting a cross in the background, it is a portrait of a miner's wife with a child perched on her shoulder.

Largely dismissed as a second-rate WPA painter, Evergood was a militant supporter of workers' rights who, though marginalized by art critics and museums, developed a highly idiosyncratic and socially conscious style that looks astonishingly fresh today.

"I love this painting; it's great," Kunin said.

Most of the artists are represented by two paintings, although there are three by Evergood, including a self-portrait of him bare-chested on the beach and a quirky "Nude With Violin" that features an abstract pattern spread across the model's legs caused by sunlight shining through a checkered cloth.

Perhaps the two strongest paintings in the show are by Walt Kuhn, one of the original organizers of the Armory Show of 1913 that introduced European modernism to this country.

Reflecting the artist's lifelong interest in clowns and circus figures, "Roberto" (1946) is a mesmerizing character study of an athletic performer in white face gazing hypnotically at the viewer.

Many critics consider it the best painting of Kuhn's career, created only a few years before the artist's death.

Kuhn's portrait of a costumed female performer, "Angna Enters" (1924), has become one of the exhibit's most iconic images, but Kunin said when he originally spotted it, the painting was dirty and sitting unframed on the floor of a gallery owner's storage space.

Other outstanding paintings include Paul Cadmus' amusing "Aspects of

Suburban Life: Main Street," John Steuart Curry's soaring "The Flying Codonas," Yasuo Kuniyoshi's enchanting "Girl and Barnyard Animals," Alice Neel's haunting "Young Woman," Bernard Perlin's virtuoso "Autumn Leaves" and Charles Sheeler's view of skiers through a "Winter Window."

Ben Shahn's hilarious "Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers" features the artist using a camera with a right-angle lens to take candid photographs.

"Villa America" takes its title from a small sign painted by Gerald Murphy that hung at the front door to his home on the French Riviera, which became a gathering place for American and European modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Cole Porter.

Murphy only created about 15 paintings during his 10-year painting career, including the highly stylized and thoroughly modern "Doves" (1925).

"Villa America" brings to life the early, heady days of American modernism, when artists were struggling with the transition from 19th-century realism to the pluralistic styles, ranging from photorealism to pure abstraction, that mark the 20th century. The chance to see this superb collection is an opportunity no art lover should miss.

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(E-mail: dgoddard@express-news.net)

c.2006 San Antonio Express-News