Art Review | ‘Modern Life: A Global Artworld 1850-1950,’ 2025

New Permanent Collection Exhibition at Santa Barbara Museum of Art Spans a Century and Conveys the Collection’s Own Story

Gallery shot of the 'Modern Life' exhibit at SBMA | Photo: Josef Woodard

At a moment when Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is largely powered by art drawn from the Museum’s expansive (and expanding) permanent collection, with a particular leaning into contemporary and modernist art, a more sweeping permanent collection party has launched in the large Ridley-Tree gallery. Modern Life: A Global Artworld 1850-1950 is essentially a multi-chaptered and organized survey and backstory of art living in SBMA vaults, which boast more than 25,000 artworks. The sum effect of the new show is a vast and varied art salon packed into the space, with a curatorial agenda attached.

Consuming one wall in the generous gallery space, tucked in the back of the Museum’s gallery complex, is a series of panels, photos, a few artworks, and historical background, under the rubric of the heading “Building a Collection for Santa Barbara.” Naturally, the health and continuing growth of the collection is directly tied to the affluent and cultured members of the local citizenry, which also reflects in a strong endowment.

In a show this diverse, subjective responses will draw certain viewers toward some sectors over others. For my money, the primary magnetic draw in the room falls under the broad and ever-morphing category of “Abstraction.” Among the early abstract works on view are Josef Albers’s 1940 “Mirage,” with a selective range of colors organized in a geometric maze, hinting at the Minimalist aesthetic to come, but with loose, ragged edges.

Auguste Rodin’s “Morning” | Photo: Josef Woodard

Abstraction pioneer Wassily Kandinsky is represented by the characteristic 1927 piece “Line-Spot,” a fine example of the artist’s acknowledged debt to the influence of music on his work — seen here in terms of music notation, literally, and implied aspects of harmony and rhythm, translated into Kandinsky’s distinctive visual language.

Varied angles — and shape-shifting — on the theme of abstraction take assorted forms elsewhere in this corner of the gallery. Underrated Mexican painter Gunther Gerzso (who had a fondly remembered exhibition at the Museum in 2003) spins off of allusions to irregular fabric shapes, its deeper intentions embedded in the painting’s title, “Time Eats Life to the Core.” Gerzso’s formal touch leads us back naturally to the undertow of abstraction seen in the neighboring painting on the wall, Henri Matisse’s 1901 “Pont Saint-Michel.” We don’t think of Matisse as an abstractionist, per se, but the undertow was always there in his work, as in the analytical balance of forms, lines, and hues in this bridge painting. Concrete reality and its hidden life force — also with a bridge as subject — is also apparent in the 1937 “Garden with Small Bridge” by Pierre Bonnard, the individualistic post-impressionist with his own claim staked in the backyard garden of abstractionism.

Richmond Barthé’s “Julius” | Photo: Josef Woodard

A similar leap from representation to its non-representational mode is evident in Theophilus Brown’s “Football Painting #2,” in which the established Bay Area Figuration artist jumps into the fray of blurring and capturing the anarchic mesh of football players’ anatomies in a messy formal pile.

In this exhibition scheme, some works speak across the show to others in unexpected ways. The familiar sight of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Dead Cottonwood Tree, Abiquiu, New Mexico,” finds its arid landscape iconography echoed in the pale, spindly forms in Kay Sage’s sleekly surreal “Second Song.”

Photography has its own corner, in a small sub-show of small black-and-white images called “Photography from the Machine Age,” including the architectural insights of Julius Shulman. Figurative sculpture assumes its rightful place on the gallery floor, including a bevvy of pieces by August Rodin.

While the show’s organization suggests a fresh perspective afoot in the space, there are plenty of evergreen favorites often seen in this gallery space, and always worth another look — like checking in on an old trusty friend. From the American urban fabric, George Wesley Bellows’ 1905 “Steaming Streets” depicts early 20^th century New York City as a bustling and also chaotic place, in sharp contrast to the unpeopled meditative stillness of Edward Hopper’s “November, Washington Square,” which the great American painter started in 1932 and finished in 1959.

Salvador Dali’s “Honey is Sweeter Than Blood” | Photo: Josef Woodard

Salvador Dali’s nude from outer and inner space, “Honey is Sweeter than Blood,” always begs for our attention, again and again. A newer entry from the Surrealist camp is the eye-snatching Dorr Bothwell painting “Family Portrait,” a bifurcated, double-identity portrait of a child.

From SBMA’s impressionist canvas treasury, it’s always a pleasure to recast a gaze at Monet’s fogged-over and gauzily painted bridge studies and the more lucid leisurely idylls of Berthe Morisot’s “View of Paris from the Trocadero” and Mary Cassatt’s “Summertime,” with its mother and child drifting idly in a boat on a pond, the watery ripples glistening in delicate brushwork.

Pierre Bonnard’s “Garden with Small Bridge” | Photo: Josef Woodard

In other Monet news, the much-admired and even somewhat locally co-opted painting “Villas in Bordighera” (1884), a warming vision painted on the Italian Riviera, is easily reimagined as a scene from Santa Barbara’s own “American Riviera” identity and atmosphere. Having grown up seeing this painting at the Museum, and as a best-selling card in the gift shop, and as a general SBMA icon, we’re entitled to our collective delusions. And we don’t imagine that Claude would mind.

Modern Life: A Global Artworld 1850-1950 is currently on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art. See sbma.net.