Baker Museum Embraces the Abstract

The Baker Museum at Artis—Naples is hosting an exhibition that features American Abstract art.

Located on the third floor of the Baker Museum, 100 Years of American Abstraction features the museum’s permanent collection of Abstract art done by American artists throughout the 20^th century. The works, which range from glass sculpture to crayon drawings, showcase American artists that wanted to redefine art for the American public and to show the art world what they were capable of doing. European artists, such as Picasso, who had been on the forefront of abstract art at the beginning of the 20^th century, inspired and motivated American artists to break away from the narrative realism of popular American art at the time.

“Up until the Armory Show of 1913, most of America thought of art in kind of the traditional ways: representational, figures that you knew what you were looking at, religious art, landscape art,” says Baker Museum Docent Phyllis Barolsky.

 The Armory Show had 300,000 attendants over the span of a tour that traveled from New York to Chicago and then to Boston. It challenged the American public to reconsider how they defined art; while it was difficult to grasp when it was first introduced, and still is for some people, Abstract art has become one of the predominant art movements of the 20^th century.

According to Barolsky, “It made the biggest difference and that is a lot of what art is about—just kind of the constant change and constant movement.”

Barolsky hurriedly walks towards an artwork, “Let me show you one of my favorites. This painting was done by a former architect, but if you notice the building doesn’t look like a building an architect would want to design.”

 The building in the painting features a jagged, uneven roof line and disproportionate, off-center windows. The artist wasn’t trying to depict a realistic building, but was more interested in making a visually curious work that also includes an oddly curved tree and a hunched over man in coat.

When walking through the exhibition’s galleries, there is a noticeable contrast between the artworks’ multitude of colors and semi-distorted forms and the galleries’ hard wood laminate floorboards. In a space that can be filled with thunderous noise by a single sneeze, the busy shapes and palettes of Abstract art provide a sense of energy that the exhibition space would otherwise lack.

100 Years of American Abstraction can be seen now through Oct. 26.