Of the many strengths of “Southern/Modern,” a daring and revisionist show about the American South at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, the one that follows you out to your car is the alternate history of modern art it proposes.
Southern art — or food or literature, for that matter — has long suffered a reputation of isolation.
You would have to be born there,” says the tortured Quentin in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” Ninety years later, Southern exceptionalism is over (mostly), and the area’s artists and curators and chefs now go to great, overcorrective lengths to be global, to be modern.
But the artists of Faulkner’s day — they were still responding to an ancient, haunted South.
These 100 or so paintings and prints suggest an invigorating direction that was there all along: a pungent pairing of social history with artistic experiment during the first half of the 20th century.
Persons:
”, Quentin, William Faulkner’s “ Absalom, Absalom ! ”, Mason, “
Organizations:
Georgia Museum of Art, Dixon, Museum of Modern Art
Locations:
Athens, Southern exceptionalism, Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, New York