Modern Masters: Twentieth Century Prints

The Haggin Museum is pleased to announce the opening of Modern Masters: Twentieth Century Prints which will be on view from January 17 through February 24, 2019. The exhibition was organized by the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania.

This engaging exhibition features thirty prints by modern artists from the 1920s through the early twenty-first century and is drawn from the Reading Public Museum’s collection. Early modernists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, join Surrealists Roberto Matta, Salvador Dali, and Pop artist Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring in this fascinating look at works on paper from the twentieth century. Other artists featured in the show include Sam Francis, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Mel Ramos, Raphael Soyer, Sonia Delaunay, François Gilot, Alex Katz, and Jim Dine.

Artistic movements of the early twentieth century such as Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism challenged the notion that art needed to “look real.” By the nineteen-teens, artists achieved pure abstraction, reducing forms to expressive lines or blocks of color. Representational or figurative art was largely abandoned in the 40s and 50s when Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting took the lead as the reigning international styles. In place of naturalism, artists emphasized formal elements such as color and line, infusing their works with emotional content and personal vision. Even as cutting-edge art moved toward abstraction, many artists adhered to the human figure and representation in their work. Social Realism, Regionalism, Pop art and Photorealism continued to enlist the human form as subject matter. Visitors will be able to explore a wide variety of approaches to both the human form and abstraction. Some artists included in the exhibition combine elements of both, while others remain true to nature and to abstraction.