Frye's exhibit on German artistic rebellion shows art on the cusp of something big

Achtung! There is some major history reconstruction and context building going on at the Frye Art Museum with a big show dedicated to the Munich Secession.

This artistic rebellion, begun in 1892, made the Munich Secession the first of its kind. (Formally resigning from an artists' organization to form another group differed from earlier actions of the era, such as the French Impressionists who sought alternatives to state-sponsored exhibits.)

You may be more familiar with the Vienna Secession and its most famous member, Gustav Klimt, but the Munich Secession came first and was enormously influential on later splinter movements and on the development of modern art in general.

The various artists, including Franz von Stuck and Fritz von Uhde, forged "passageways to modern art in the 20th century," according to the curator of the exhibition, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director emerita of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and current Frye Foundation Scholar.

A key goal of the exhibition is the reclamation of this story. Because of the difficulties in embracing German history rent by the two World Wars, scholars and the public have neglected this crucial moment when the Munich artists were revolting against the past and embracing change.

While many artists across Europe, and in the United States, were painting highly contrived, deeply hued compositions inside studio settings, von Uhde said that when he "entered modernity," it "seemed like coming from the dark to the light — when I strove to depart from the forever brown atelier sauce, I thought to myself: There has to be something here [in painting] that grabs people from within."

For von Uhde, the rebellion against tradition meant a lighter palette, one based on observation of nature but also a more truthful, direct expression of emotion. Other artists in the Munich group experimented in different ways, with technique — as seen in pointillist brushwork or the flattening of forms — or with subject matter as in symbolist expressions of idealized, or dark, sexuality.

The artists encouraged diversity and experimentation, another reason scholars have had a hard time plugging this "movement" into art history.

Wandering through the exhibition, which takes up most of the Frye, the variety is abundantly clear: landscapes, religious paintings, nudes and portraits all embedded with divergent expressive and stylistic choices.

If you're a fan of von Stuck's "Sin" (Die Sünde), and other works in the Frye's permanent collection, you should go to see them hanging amid their original brethren, on loan from major European collections and museums. He is represented by must-see works like his posters for the Secessionist exhibitions and "Temptation" ("Versuchung"), a dark, swirling painting of compressed religious and sexual tension, on loan from the Museum Villa Stuck.

Also, pay close attention to the way the exhibition is hung. The Munich secessionists initiated the "modern hang" — in which works of art are hung in one row with plenty of room around them on neutral white walls — in stark contrast to the 19th century's salon-style exhibitions of paintings hung close together, stacked up to the ceiling.

The secessionists wanted to open viewers' eyes to their bold adventures in painting.

To our eyes, a lot of the works may not seem to be cutting-edge, and the quality of the works in the show jumps around quite a bit.

But there are some moments of quiet brutality (as in Oskar Zwintscher's "The Dead Man by the Sea") and some visual stunners (Eugen Spiro's "The Dancer Baladine Klossowska" is worth a visit alone).

Mainly, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see works that rarely travel and to think about this neglected moment when artists were on the cusp of radical modernism.

According to Birnie Danzker, the Frye's founding collection is "incredibly important" in its overall coherence and because it contains "masterpieces" of the Munich Secession and of (get ready for this word) the Künstlergenossenschaft, the established organization of artists against which the Secession was reacting.

In a smart curatorial move, Birnie Danzker has set up two galleries of paintings by the Künstlergenossenschaft to lead into the Secession show.

In addition to rebuilding the history of this period by gathering these paintings and the most recent scholarship together, the exhibition signals another effort by the Frye to put its permanent collection in context.

Since taking the job of chief curator at the Frye in 2005, Robin Held has consistently investigated and revitalized the historical roots and current context of the collection.

This show may be its most academically ambitious effort to date.