SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Co-organized by the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art is an expansive exhibition conceived as a journey into the connections between spirituality and modern and contemporary art. Spanning the years from 1911 to 2011, the exhibition features more than sixty works on loan to the CJM from SFMOMA’s internationally acclaimed collection—ranging from popular favorites to some that have not been seen by the public for many years—and includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, video, and installation. The artists represent a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and interests: early twentieth-century visionaries such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian; such mid-century innovators as Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko; leading postwar artists including Bruce Conner, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, and Nam June Paik; and a diverse group of contemporary artists, among them Teresita Fernández, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Zarina.
Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art is the first in a series of collaborative museum exhibitions that SFMOMA has developed as part of its extensive off-site programming during the two-and-a-half year construction phase of its major expansion project. While its building is temporarily closed for construction from the summer of 2013 to early 2016, SFMOMA will present a dynamic slate of jointly organized and traveling exhibitions; public art displays and site-specific installations; and newly created education programs throughout the Bay Area and beyond.
“The CJM is thrilled to have this opportunity to work with SFMOMA’s extraordinary collection to explore the convergence of art and spirituality in the modern age,” says Karen Tsujimoto, curator at the CJM. “As a museum dedicated to new Jewish perspectives on art, culture, and history, this unique collaboration allows us to examine and reveal surprising ways in which Jewish thought and modern art intersect.”
“We could not be more pleased by the freshness of vision that has resulted from our collaboration with the CJM,” notes Caitlin Haskell, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture. “It’s immensely exciting to see the works presented anew, and just around the corner from SFMOMA. Even those who have visited the museum for years won’t have experienced the works quite like this before.”
Beyond Belief is divided into ten sections, organized under headings that examine widely held spiritual ideas, many of which closely parallel or are rooted in Jewish religious thought—such as the Bible’s original creation story and the bias against literal depictions of God. The exhibition begins, aptly, with Genesis and wends its way through different sections that reveal how artists have addressed diverse spiritual ideas, such as the invisible presence of God, death, redemption, mystical writing, and the understanding of God as a divine architect.
Prominently featured are several major artists of Jewish heritage including Helène Aylon, Wallace Berman, Ross Bleckner, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Alfred Stieglitz. These artists have traditionally been appreciated for their secular contributions to modern art, while the influence of Judaism or spirituality on their practice has been understated. Stieglitz, for example, declared in a letter to a friend: “Several people feel I have photographed God.” The noted photographer was referring to his new series Equivalents, small black-and-white photographs of cloud formations—a selection of which are included in the exhibition—that found their place in art history as the first example of abstract photography. Likewise, Newman, a celebrated Abstract Expressionist, will be assessed in light of his deep interest in Jewish mysticism. Guston and Rothko similarly acknowledged a spiritual aspect of their paintings—as Rothko once famously remarked, “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” Stunning large-scale examples of both artists’ work are featured in this show.
The exhibition has a capacious reach, exploring spiritual dimensions well beyond Judaism. Many rich religious stories are translated into complex and provocative works of art as seen in Bruce Conner’s ink drawing Burning Bush, 1962; Alfred Jensen’s painting Expulsion from Eden, 1958; and Kiki Smith’s haunting sculpture Lilith, 1994. The section titled ‘God in the Abstract’ is devoted to the work of early twentieth-century European artists such as Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Collectively, these modern masters sought to communicate a sense of spirituality in their austerely abstract work, which is often composed of little more than vertical and horizontal lines in geometric compositions. As Mondrian once explained: “To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. Thus . . . we find ourselves in the presence of abstract art.”
Visitors are also encouraged to think about the fundamentalist Christian upbringing of seminal post-war artist Robert Rauschenberg in light of his early works, such as Mother of God, ca. 1950. The important influence of Asian spirituality is also considered in several artworks by Sam Francis, Brice Marden, and Agnes Martin, artists who have fully acknowledged the influence of Buddhism in their art. The purity and quiet intensity of these artists’ work might serve as a metaphor for contemplation and communion.
Several media installations and major sculptures are interspersed throughout the gallery including Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha, 1989; Mona Hatoum’s Pin Rug, 1998-99, a prayer rug made of upward pointing pins; and videos by Bill Viola, Daniel Reeves, and Gary Hill which explore birth, death, and renewal.
