Photo By CAM

Georgia O'Keeffe's "Red Hills, Lake George"

We live in the age of blockbuster exhibitions. Great works of art from far-flung locations are gathered together under one roof to celebrate an artist, a period in art history or a variety of new themes providing in-depth consideration.

Around these exhibitions is the required buildup of media-induced excitement and peer pressure buzz. As a result there are long lines, crowded galleries and the inevitable museum fatigue, as I call it, because blockbuster exhibitions are large and rambling affairs. In major cities, it often takes half a day to make your way through the ticket line, the exhibition itself and then the thematically-related gift shop and cafe.

In direct contrast to this is the newly popular mini-exhibition, a small show with a concentrated theme and narrow perspective. It fills only a gallery or two and can be enjoyed, or shall I say savored, in half an hour. The visitor comes away enlightened and refreshed, no timed ticket required and no museum fatigue incurred.

If you like, as I do, the idea of just popping into a museum for a short but stimulating visit on a regular basis without the lines, crowds and time commitment of the blockbuster, you'll be delighted by Natural Moderns, a mini-exhibition now on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Natural Moderns fills just one gallery and presents 11 paintings on loan from The Phillips Collection, a museum in Washington, D.C. The pictures, all small, are by four American artists: Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), John Marin (1870-1953) and Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986).

The artists and their works share two fundamental concerns. First, in a time when modern art was associated with European art, they set out to create a modernism that was uniquely American. Second, they ventured into the American landscape for their inspiration and themes.

In the early part of the 20th century, artists living and working in America were doing so under the inspiring yet intimidating shadow of European art. Paris was the recognized capital of the art world. There was no American art capital and no identified American aesthetic sensibility. (It would take World War II and the power of Abstract Expressionism to make New York the center of the art world.)

Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and art dealer who promoted the four artists in Natural Moderns, wrote in 1923 that he wanted to advance art that was "American without that dammed French flavor." These four artists shared his philosophy and provided him with pictures to exhibit in his struggling, but now famous galleries, first 291 (known according to its location at 291 Fifth Ave.) and later An American Place.

While the Stieglitz galleries were in the heart of New York, much of the art exhibited there was inspired by non-urban locations. If you delve into these artists' biographies, you're struck by the constant references to the various landscapes and rural homes that served as their inspiration: the rocky coastline of Penobscot Bay in Maine; the sandy beaches of Provincetown, Mass.; the grandeur of Bear Mountain in the Berkshires; the vastness of the southwestern desert; a farmhouse on Lake George, N.Y.; or an adobe home in Abiquiu, N.M.

The earliest painting in the exhibition, Marsden Hartley's diminutive 1912 oil "Mountain Lake: Autumn", illustrates the transition from European stylistic influences toward an original American aesthetic. "Mountain Lake" is indebted to Fauvism, the movement that launched Matisse and his fellow artists several years earlier, and is characterized by startling color used for expressive rather than descriptive results.

In Hartley's picture, which is only 12 inches square, the artist has captured a sweeping landscape. In a small space, he's managed to include a lake with its shoreline, a vast mountain side and a cloud-filled sky during the time of year when the foliage has turned from soft greens to brilliant oranges, reds and yellows.

The brush stokes are short and angled so the viewer sees and feels the wind rustling through the brittle, yet bright, leaves. We sense the movement of the clouds across the autumn sky.

Hartley's landscape is deeply felt, and he successfully captures and communicates the intensity of his emotions with this picture. But the miraculous achievements of Dove and O'Keefe during the next few decades deliver a truly American modernism from lives lived fully within the American landscape.

O'Keefe wrote that Dove was "the only American painter who is of the earth." Dove's consuming inspiration was the natural world. He wasn't interested in describing the landscape but rather in putting down on canvas the intangible sensations and experiences that it afforded him.

He felt nature and was awed by it. Like the 19th century transcendentalists, Dove considered nature, untouched by modern culture, his true spiritual source.

Capturing the essence and power of natural phenomenon is what drove him to create pictures such as "Sun Drawing Water." In general, the location compares to the Hartley: a shoreline, a hillside and the sky, all depicted within a small space. His emphasis on seasonal change had been intensified by a more dramatic and abstracted approach.

O'Keefe might be associated with her later years in New Mexico, but before that she spent considerable time at Lake George. Her 1927 picture "Red Hills, Lake George" captures the essence of the sunset as only she could see it, in a manner that in time would define American modernism.

The sun radiates bands of different colored light. Its glow is reflected and intensified as it illuminates the hillside. The land becomes the red of the sun. The sky and the earth are joined as they're bathed in the omnipresent power of light and heat.

If you want to get a glimpse of the world as O'Keefe, Dove, Hartley and Marin saw it while they were on the path to creating what's now considered the first truly American modern art, set aside just a half hour or so to check out Natural Moderns. This well done mini-exhibition is a breath of fresh air for any season.