The snow is gone, daffodils are coming up in Central Park, and there are terrific shows in all of the major New York museums. The three I saw—at the Guggenheim, the Neue Galerie, and the Whitney —all draw on the early part of the twentieth century when artists in Europe and the United States were rejecting the styles, subjects, and premises of the previous one.

Robert Henri

The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910–1918. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street), New York, NY, until June 1, 2011.

Vienna 1900: Style and Identity. At Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, until June 27, 2011.

Hopper and his Time. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York, NY, until April 10, 2011.

By Helen Epstein.

I started my tour of the museums at the Guggenheim where The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910–1918 was pulling in a crowd. This exhibit includes over 100 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by artists from Germany, Russia, France, Spain, and Italy, drawn from the Guggenheim collections in both Venice and New York.

It is a chronological, nicely-hung show that reshuffles and showcases the museum’s holdings in a straightforward way. I’m not crazy about this period—a motley collection of modernist“isms,” including cubism, futurism, expressionism, constructivism, and suprematism, each of which produced self-justifying manifestos. I find the work less visually pleasurable than intellectually interesting. If you love this stuff, you’ll be happy. I very much liked a few paintings by Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo, an early, bright Chagall soldier and a large Frantisek Kupka reclining nude but did not spend more than two hours at The Great Upheaval.

Carlo Severini, Red Cross Train Passing a Village,Train de la Croix Rouge, Summer 1915 (detail) at the Guggenheim

I could have spent days at the smaller Neue Galerie, two blocks down Fifth Avenue where Vienna 1900: Style and Identity casts a larger time net, taking in the last decade of the 19th century and the first full first decade of the 20th. This is a multi-media show with more than 150 individual works from the museum’s permanent collecton as well as from other collections in the United States and Europe. It includes major paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl, Max Oppenhemer, and Oskar Kokoschka; recordings of music by Anton Weber and Arnold Schoenberg; engagingly naive soft-porn from 1906–1910 (Saturn Films) that invite fantasies of stag parties during the Hapsburg Monarchy; erotic drawings; posters, clothing, textiles, glass, and furniture.

Corset, ca. 1880-85 at the Neue Galerie

One of the show’s themes, “unmasking the Inner Man,” includes a replica of Freud’s couch on which you can lie down, with a portrait of the analyst looking down from the wall behind you. Another exhibit under the rubric “Representing Women in Vienna,” features an exquisitely embroidered corset fit for Scarlett O’Hara (size 0) and an example of a Reformed (corsetless) Dress.

It’s a sumptuous, deeply pleasurable exhibit that immerses the visitor in the sights and sounds and textures of turn-of-the-century Vienna. I found the curatorial style somewhat ponderous: “Questions of identity often come to the fore in times of radical historical change,” but the good news is that the art (both “fine” and “decorative”—hard to separate the two here) speaks for itself. And, if you like Central European food, there is no better place in New York to enjoy a plate of goulash with spaetzle and a glass of holunderblutensaft, elderflower syrup with sparkling water. Not to speak of the many outrageously rich Viennese pastries and the echt décor, down to newspapers on reading sticks. Just so you know, children under 12 are not admitted to the Neue Galerie, and adolescents need to be accompanied.

Much as I adore the intimate splendor of the Neue Galerie, I’m a Hopper fan and the highlight of my museum-going was the Whitney’s Modern Life: Edward Hopper and his Time, which runs only another six weeks and is well worth the trip to New York even if you see nothing else. The Whitney, of course, owns most of Hopper’s work, over 3000 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, many made here in Massachusetts, but for this exhibit it has also borrowed from many other collections.

The show begins with a large, reclining portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney from 1916 by Robert Henri, a painting that is particularly interesting after seeing Kupka’s Reclining Nude at the Guggenheim. Gertrude V. Whitney is, of course, the force behind the collection and the founder of the Museum, an unusual patron-sculptor with both money and mind of her own. She studied art in Paris at about the same time many of the artists in this exhibit did and lived to see some of her own work exhibited in public spaces.

Hopper by Hopper at the Whitney

Hopper lived in Paris between 1906 and 1910, and his takes on Parisian life includes the famous Soir Bleu with its cast of characters that range from workmen to haut bourgeois, with Hopper as Clown; and Le Bistro, which shows an unusual, Hopper Paris almost devoid of people and presages the painter’s later famously lonely canvases.

Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, like the Guggenheim and Neue Galerie exhibits, documents how early-twentieth-century artists were responding to rapid industrialization and the development of photography and throwing out nineteenth-century artistic conventions. But the Hopper show is unmistakably American. It shows us the development of some of American realism between 1900 and 1940. Edward Hopper’s oils and water colors, urban and rural, are contextualized here by 80 photographs, films, and other paintings by other American artists such as John Sloan, Ben Shahn, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Charles Demuth, Robert Henri. Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield, and Reginald Marsh.

The curators, Barbara Haskell and Sasha Nicholas, are to be commended for a rewarding and superbly intelligent show that makes the most of the artist and his time.

=====================================================

Helen Epstein is the author of several books on Kindle about performers and cultural life.