MODERN MOSAICS

COLLECTOR'S FOCUS MODERN ART

- JOHN O'HERN

Having been an ardent supporter of contemporary representational art since the early 1990s, stretching the spectrum from the hyperreal to the nearly abstract, I’m happy to introduce this special section on modern art, which we’re defining as encompassing “any painting or sculpture that toys with the edge of the representational all the way into the realm of the purely abstract.”

Several decades before taking up the banner of “realist” art, I worked at what was then the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, which has an extraordinary collection of 20th century non-objective art assembled primarily by two gifted and insightful men, the benefactor Seymour Knox and the museum’s then director Gordon Smith and his successors.

I have to admit that in the beginning I didn’t “get it.” I sat in front of the art, studied, met the artists and asked countless questions of our associate director, Jim Wood, who would go on to head the Art Institute of Chicago and later, the J. Paul Getty Trust. I came to understand modern art’s place in history, its roots and its ability to expand awareness and expression.

When I was in Buffalo, I knew of Peter Stephens but we had never met until he had an exhibition here in Santa Fe last November. I had, however, included one of his paintings inspired by the photographer Eugène Atget in an exhibition at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York. His work at that time was a “look at the way nostalgia and romanticism is codified through an overlay of historical and cultural distance.” Since then, he has explored the science of pattern inspired by the “fundamental forces of nature.”