John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, and Georgia
O'Keeffe applied a radical new style of seeing and
painting to traditional subjects, such as landscapes
and portraits. They were heavily influenced by
the European modernists that exhibited in the 1913
Armory Show in New York. This was America's first
taste of abstraction, and it revolutionized the
way art was made in this country. Some of these modernists
made their way out West; soon thereafter, their
work was forever changed. For example, on the center
wall, Georgia O'Keeffe's painting, Red Hills, Grey
Sky, conveys her love of the landscape. Here she is,
in a 1977 interview conducted by Perry Miller Adato
for the film, Georgia O'Keeffe: "When I got to New
Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was
my country. I'd never seen anything like it
before, but it fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air,
it's different. The sky is different, the stars are different,
the wind this different. I shouldn't say too much
about it because other people may be interested and
I don't want them interested." Look to your far left
to see a poignant representation of a young Indian
woman, painted by Russian modernist artist Nicolai
Fechin around 1928. Here, he's squeezed paint onto
the canvas and used a palette knife to create aggressive,
broad strokes of color. In fact, he was often so spontaneous
in his brushstrokes that his subjects would get
nervous, wondering if their likenesses would ever be true.
Bisttram often took liberties to create
his ideal composition, and talked openly about his
process: "This is ... an old lady who lived across the
street from me. ...She came with a polka dot dress
in blue and a white shirt waist, she had no shawl on,
she just walked in smoking a cigarette ... I changed
the dress to terracotta ... and the shirt into blue and
a white collar on it, because this is what I needed
for the composition."