Tate Liverpool
23 June 2003 – 1 July 2005
This exciting new display from the Tate Collection focuses on international developments in modern art since 1900. Changing over a three-year period, International Modern Art features important works from the Collection, many of which have not been shown in Liverpool before.
It follows a loose chronology and showcases major international movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Land art and Arte Povera. The display starts with artists such as Paul Cézanne, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain and Pablo Picasso and their ground-breaking approaches to painting. In reaction to the extreme disruption of the First World War, the 1920s continental scene saw artists as diverse as Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Duncan Grant and Henri Matisse producing images of idealised female figures which mimicked the styles of classical and primitive art.
The second half of the century begins with the body in action and showcases abstract painting by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana, Hermann Nitsch as well as monumental figurative sculpture by Germaine Richier; reflecting the anxiety of the post-war period and demonstrating artists attempts to redefine themselves in relation to the physical world. In the 1960s artists took this a stage further by leaving the studio and venturing out into the landscape. Measuring, photographing, sculpting and even wrapping nature are some of the techniques featured in the work of Christo, American Land artists Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, and British Land artists Richard Long and Keith Arnatt. This display also includes the work of Italian Arte Povera artists such as Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Giuseppe Penone who reconsider the role of natural materials in relation to the human body. The final section brings together international art at the end of the twentieth century, examining the body politic, as artists across the world began to focus on international political issues such as war, genocide, terrorism and exile. Powerful works by artists including Mona Hatoum, Barbara Kruger and William Kentridge show how the role of art is as much about communicating issues as it is about being a source of healing.
International Modern Art includes a room focused on the work of a single artist, beginning with the work of the pioneering French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska which includes sculpture, drawings and archive material.