Paths to Abstraction: Pioneers of Early 20th Century Painting

Thirty-six paintings, drawings, and prints by six of modern art's pioneers of abstract painting are on display in The Path to Abstraction: Pioneers of Early Twentieth Century Painting.  The exhibition features works from the permanent collection by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Josef Albers.

With the exception of El Lissitzky and Jawlensky, all of these artists taught at the Bauhaus, where they worked alongside the influential and inspiring Kandinsky. The artists in this exhibition represent two different approaches to the abstract depiction of the objective world. Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky favored an intuitive, romantic interpretation of abstract art within its roots in the analogous German Expressionist philosophy. Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Albers explored the rational, intellectual constructions of abstraction whose roots can be traced to Picasso's cubism. The concern of these artists, however, lay not solely in creating abstract art for art's sake, but in conveying the essence of objective reality through the arrangements of abstract motifs.