Vlaminck, Herrera, and Rauschenberg Newly on View This Fall

While the People’s Collection remains an enduring cultural resource in North Carolina, its publicly accessible works are constantly changing. The NCMA’s curatorial department consistently reorganizes gallery displays, cultivating opportunities to exhibit artwork previously in storage or sourced from other collections around the world. Recent artwork rotations in West Building’s 20th-century galleries reveal the diverse styles that comprise early modernist movements, create a dialogue among various expressionist pioneers, and honor the legacy of a groundbreaking American painter and graphic artist. Here are just a few of the modern masterpieces newly on view this fall:

Maurice de Vlaminck, Le Pont de Poissy (The Bridge at Poissy), 1905

Along with Henri Matisse and André Derain, Vlaminck was one of the key figures of the movement known as fauvism—a term coined after the 1905 Salon d’Automne, at which the critic Louis Vauxcelles ridiculed the exhibiting artists as “fauves,” or wild beasts, due to their use of intense color and disregard for realism. Unlike Matisse and Derain, Vlaminck was restrained in his ability to travel due to his economic instability, compelling him to experiment with depictions of the towns and villages just north of Paris. The foregrounded barge in Le Pont de Poissy emphasizes the Seine’s role as a waterway along which commercial trade took place, speaking to industrialization in early 20th-century France. “Vlaminck was an anarchist,” said Jared Ledesma, curator of 20th-century and contemporary art at the NCMA, “and he looked to fauvism as a means of rebellion. He used color to rebel against tradition.”

Carmen Herrera, Green and Orange, 1958

Herrera was a Havanna-born artist recognized late in life for her striking use of minimal geometric forms. Green and Orange was painted in the lead up to Herrera’s most famous series, Blanco y Verde, studying the interplay of colors and the impact of visual simplification. Herrera’s art remained largely unsung until the 21st century, due to prevailing negative attitudes about women in art and Cubans in America. Placing Green and Orange in the same gallery as Picasso’s Seated Woman, Red and Yellow Background (painted six years prior), Ledesma hopes to emphasize the “diversity of styles practiced around the same time in the mid-20th century.”

Robert Rauschenberg, Credit Blossom (Spread), 1978

In a nod to Rauschenberg 100—commemorating the global centennial celebration of the artist’s birth—Ledesma has brought a large-scale example of the artist’s work out of storage. Rauschenberg, an alumnus of NC’s own Black Mountain College, is best known for what he termed “combines,” or works of art that combine painting and sculpture, a practice now referred to as assemblage. Credit Blossom (Spread) was created as part of Rauschenberg’s Spreads series (1975–83), which gets its title from “land (like a farmer’s ‘spread’),” according to the artist, “and also the stuff you put on toast.” Most of the materials used to create Spreads came from objects Rauschenberg used in his daily life. He incorporated these scavenged articles into displays that featured solvent transfer images applied to fabric collages on wood panels.

In addition to the works above, the following have also recently been placed on view in the 20th-century galleries:

• Lyonel Feininger, The Green Bridge II, 1916
• Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, Two Nude Figures in a Landscape, 1913
• Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait with Hand to Forehead, 1910
• Jean Hélion, Composition, 1934
• Claude Flynn Howell, Mending Nets, 1947