New exhibit showcasing the Jazz Age to open this month

The Island Now
The original painting by Francis Cugat of the cover art for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

An exhibition celebrating the Roaring Twenties, Anything Goes: The Jazz Age, will open at the Nassau County Museum of Art on Saturday, March 24 and be on display through July 8.

Wild, hot, roaring, and free, the Jazz Age is immediately identified as the glorious heyday of artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Coco Chanel, Langston Hughes, Charles Lindbergh and other rebels who took the freedom of the age to new creative heights in New York, Paris and the Riviera.

Among the rare and many treasures on view in this new exhibit is the original painting by Francis Cugat (brother of Xavier) that became the iconic cover of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” — the first time it has ever been loaned by Princeton University.

In a multimedia exhibition that combines art, literature, design and music, visitors will revisit the masterpieces and experiments of a generation that changed the history of Modernism. The giants among the artists were Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Beckmann, Nolde, Lachaise, Man Ray, Stuart Davis, Florine Stettheimer and Tamara de Lempicka, all of whom are represented in the show with major works, including a little-known Picasso drawing of the famous Jazz Age muse Sara Murphy on the beach at Antibes, as well as a spectacular Léger still life.

The exhibition tracks the progress of Modernism in art from Cubism to Neoclassicism. Composers such as Gershwin and Porter were taking syncopation and the blues to new heights at this time, and their records, sheet music, and piano rolls are on view and will be heard throughout the show on ’20’s-era turntables and player pianos.

The Ballets Russes, for whom Picasso and Chanel designed productions, broke all dance conventions and inspired a new wave of fashion, with examples in the exhibition curated by noted expert on ’20’s fashion, JoAnne Olian. The exhibit’s pieces of Art Deco furniture and rare jewelry from the private collection of the Macklowe Gallery display the machine-age elegance that was in vogue.

Coco Chanel, photograph by Man Ray

Drawing on museum, university and private collections, including those of the Heckscher Museum, Parrish Museum, Cradle of Aviation Museum, New York University Grey Art Gallery, and Princeton University, the wide-ranging exhibition has been underwritten by the Americana Manhasset and Wheatley Plaza, longtime supporters of the museum and its mission.

In addition, the programming and publications have been sponsored by generous gifts from The Ritz-Carlton Residences and by Charles Scribner III. Each week the show will feature special programming, including live jazz in the beautiful, paneled library of the mansion, lectures by experts in the arts and design, and live demonstrations of the player piano and Victrola, in addition to the museum’s renowned docent-led tours and education programs.

Among the programming highlights are a May 12th lecture by Scribner, a popular speaker at the Morgan Library and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other venues; an original cabaret musical based on the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald composed and performed by Angela Sclafani and her ensemble; and tours of Jazz Age Manhattan led by museum director Charles A. Riley II, author of two books on the period. The museum is also publishing a fully-illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, with essays on the art, music and fashion of the era, and re-launching the official website, with special features keyed to the show.

Named after a popular Porter song at the time, the exhibition, Anything Goes, offers a comprehensive picture of the Jazz Age, which began when World War I ended on November 11, 1918 “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” and ended on October 24, 1929, when Wall Street crashed after its historic nine-year bull run.

In addition to art and design, the exhibition brings the age of superstars vividly to life with memorabilia celebrating the Golden Age of aviation, including a leather pilot’s helmet and goggles, photographs of Babe Ruth and a seat from the original Yankee Stadium built in 1923, original Victrola turntables and the first generation of radios, first editions of monumental novels and sheet music, and the original Hobey Baker trophy, the top honor for American college hockey (all players who visit wearing their team jersey during the run of the show will be admitted for free).

The Long Island connections in the show are among the highlights. On April 10, 1925, Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” was published, but he started it two years before over the garage in a rented house in Great Neck. In his lecture, Scribner III, whose grandfather published the novel, will reveal the backstory of its progress from manuscript to masterpiece under the editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins, who secured the iconic cover by Cugat. And Lindbergh took off from the storied air strip at Roosevelt Field, where Elinor Smith, the “Flying Flapper of Freeport,” set new records for altitude and endurance

The exhibition unveils some important historical discoveries, including previously unknown drawings by the poet cummings that were found by his dear friend Gaston Lachaise. Their friendship and collaboration is celebrated in a gallery that includes many of Lachaise’s greatest sculptures, including a monumental cast of Elevation, as well as his own drawings and a stunning portrait by cummings of the legendary supermodel Marion Morehouse.

A lucky group of American artists and writers in Paris during the ’20s, many of them in Stein’s circle, were pioneering a new style of abstraction, and the show boasts some significant canvases by Davis, as well as Charles Green Shaw, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, Joseph Stella, Carl Holty, Jan Matulka, Charles Biederman and an unknown work on paper by Betty Parsons, who would become best known as one of the great champions of Abstract Expressionism.

In another art historical coup, the show presents an unknown drawing by the model and muse Kiki de Montparnasse that had been hidden among the papers of Man Ray, whose portrait of Kiki is among the treasures on view, along with his portraits of Hemingway, Chanel, James Joyce and dancers from the Ballets Russes. The other major photographic finds in the show are by Carl Van Vechten, whose lens captured the jazz greats in Harlem nightclubs. The show also boasts an unknown drawing of Baker by the artist Paul Colin, whose posters, including rare examples included in the show, made her famous in Paris.

Of all the revelations, the life and work of Anna Walinska, who lived in Paris during the ’20s, is perhaps the most touching story. Walinska was a teenager from Brooklyn who met Picasso, Matisse, Stein and others while making the drawings and paintings now on view in a solo gallery in the show.

“Living well is the best revenge” was the motto of an extraordinarily fortunate generation, anything but “lost,” that remains today the epitome of sheer creative freedom.

The Nassau County Museum of Art is located at One Museum Drive in Roslyn Harbor and is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Admission is $12 for adults, $8 for seniors (62 and above) and $4 for students and children (4 to12). Members are admitted free.

For more information about the museum and exhibit, call 516-484-9338 or go to www.nassaumuseum.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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