Museums and scholars revisit the story of American modernism regularly, but few exhibitions have examined modernist works on paper. “Graphic Eloquence: American Modernism on Paper from the Collection of Michael T. Ricker,” on view from March 5 to September 4, 2022, at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, hopes to change that conversation. The exhibition includes approximately 150 works by 70 artists, both well known and overlooked, and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by the museum.
William Baziotes (American, 1912 – 1963), untitled (abstraction), 1945. Ink and watercolor, 11 9/16 × 14 1/16 inches. Promised gift of Michael T. Ricker.
Modernism reflected global shifts in thought and expression, partially as a result of the industrial revolution. The Armory Show of 1913, which opened in New York, is generally accepted as the starting point of American modernism. Although European artists received the majority of attention and exhibition space in the gallery compared to American artists, its influence was wide reaching, and artists who saw the show soon began experimenting with abstract form and new subject matter in response.
“Graphic Eloquence” aims to show the ways modernist experimentation played out through printmaking and other paper-based media, as artists invented new technologies and reinvented old ones. The exhibition includes examples of works in casein, cellocut, charcoal, collage, collagraphy, colored pencil, conté, encaustic (gesso-wax), gouache, graphite, ink, intaglio, lithography, mezzotint, monotype, oil, serigraphy, silverpoint, tempera, watercolor, woodcut and wood engraving. Its artists range similarly across the United States, including particularly strong examples by Texas artists from the Fort Worth Circle, proving once again that modernism was not purely an East Coast phenomenon.
Many of the works featured in the exhibition are part of a gift to the museum. Curator of American art Jeffrey Richmond-Moll said, “We are grateful to Michael Ricker for generously gifting these diverse expressions of the American modernist spirit to the museum. Works on paper are a longstanding strength of our museum, and Ricker’s donation will decisively deepen the stories we tell about this medium and the evolution of American abstraction across broader geographies and artistic networks.”