Thoroughly Modern Ringling?

Showcasing modernism’s softer side, the Ringling’s American Moderns, 1910-1960: From O’Keeffe to Rockwell, comprises 53 paintings and four sculptures that chart some of the main preoccupations of early-to-mid 20th century art. The Sarasota museum offers cubism being pioneered by Picasso and Braque in Paris, making the modern city a subject, and revamping traditional genres such as still life and portraiture without the bracing experimentalism of certain European artists (e.g., Marcel Duchamp, who signs a urinal and presents it as a sculpture to the 1913 Armory show in New York, or Piet Mondrian, who pursues radical abstraction with the openly declared intention of promoting social harmony).

The idea that American artists spend the pre-World War II decades being more derivative than innovative, making their most impressively original contributions post-1950 with Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism (after a number of prominent European artists immigrate to the U.S. and become teachers, not incidentally), is old hat. For the most part, American Moderns confirms this line of thought with a pleasing mix of artworks that, in effect, dabble with modernism’s wildest propositions but stop short of ploughing through sacred boundaries. Assembled by the Brooklyn Museum from its permanent collection and heavy on figurative painting, the exhibition feels like a selection of very good works — but presumably not the gems that Brooklyn would rather keep on its walls — that together offer up a modernism of avant-garde lite.

Works by Marsden Hartley, an artist I count as a favorite on account of the personal sensibility he brought to his painting, exemplify this tempered modernism. His best-known painting, “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914), an energetic column of abstracted military symbols on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is regarded as an homage to his close friend Karl von Freyburg — a 24-year-old soldier who died in World War I while the artist was living in Berlin — whom Hartley may also have loved romantically. American Moderns includes five of Hartley’s paintings, more than any other artist.

“Handsome Drinks” (1916) is the most elegant. It evokes the time Hartley, like many American artists, spent in Paris and Berlin hobnobbing with a who’s-who of modern art — Gertrude and Leo Stein (famous for their collection of avant-garde painting as well as Gertrude’s writing), Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Hartley renders a tabletop adorned with pleasure-inducing beverages in flattened, simplified form: a green glass of absinthe, a dainty Manhattan cocktail and a teacup against a black plane. (A fourth, larger chalice seems to reference Hartley’s Christian religious beliefs, the exhibition catalogue notes, while puzzling text in the background may be taking its cues from Picasso’s use of newspaper lettering in cubist collages.) Through the painting, a viewer can almost taste the intoxicating café life, giddy friendships and rivalries that fueled European painting at the time.

Four paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe constitute another cornerstone of the exhibition. Here, “Fishhook from Hawaii — No. 1” (1939) is her best. In it, O’Keeffe uses a fishing lure as a jumping-off point for an adventure in abstraction, painting an azure ocean and skyscape refracted through the lure’s coiled wire loops. The resulting picture of a surreally calm but fragmented horizon makes mesmerizing both O’Keeffe’s watery surroundings and the lure, which takes on the character of a world-changing fetish.

Despite remarkable gaps, the rest of the exhibition offers plenty of opportunities for looking with delight.

A healthy number of women are included, along with a few artists (of both genders) regarded as much as illustrators as fine artists. Keep an eye out for Brooklyn cityscapes by Isabel Lydia Whitney, who brings a disquieting melancholy to pictures of the borough’s industrial development.

American Moderns isn’t a blockbuster, but it brings paintings by some of the most engaging American artists of the 20th century within reach. Rein in your expectations and you won’t be disappointed.

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