After Modernism Is a Lesson in Curating

PHILADELPHIA — Of all the important private art collections in the United States, the Neumann family’s coffers may be the most unique. Amassed by four generations during the past seven decades, this treasure chest of nearly 3,000 20th- and 21st-century artworks swells with abundant examples by little-known newcomers and celebrated elders such as Man Ray, Keith Haring, Hannah Höch, and Claes Oldenburg. After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Family Collection, currently on view at the University of Pennsylvania’s newly renovated Arthur Ross Gallery, presents 56 works from this distinctive, rarely exhibited trove. 

Stationed near its threshold, a VR headset whisks wearers to the five-story Eastside Manhattan townhouse owned by Hubert Neumann, the collection’s voluble skipper. This virtual tour confirms that the Ross installation strategy reflects the home’s eccentric aesthetic of horror vacui, a “fear of empty space.” 

Hubert Neumann’s late parents, Morton and Rose, began collecting in 1948. They acquired Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries on view in After Modernism. Over time, their son added more recent art to the family collection. In many cases, he’s befriended artists at the start of their careers and purchased several of their works. 

One of Joseph Beuys’s signature felt suits, from 1970, unnervingly arrests attention in the tiny entryway to the Ross’s sizable gallery. Large, flamboyant paintings of recent vintage nuzzle small gems by iconic masters in the gallery, a mingling not fully covered by the show’s blanket title. 

Identifying images that conjure the Beuys (albeit horizontally, here) is as valid a way as any to enter into this widely diverse selection. One such evocation is Xavier Veilhan’s “Le Gisant” (1994), a sculpture of a clothed, supine man that exerts a magnetic pull toward the center of the floor. Positioned along the length of a pedestal, his body  references the medieval tradition of recumbent tomb figures. On a nearby wall, Tom Sanford’s commanding “Dead Michael Jackson” (2009) envisions the pop idol in one of his iconic stage costumes resting on his back inside a glass coffin. Signage mentioned Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” (1521) as a source for the pose.

Noticing covert visual cognates is one reward of close looking. Aspects of the mirror-topped vanity in Audrey Flack’s resplendent “Chanel” (1974) resurface in the reflective panels of Richard Estes’s “Escalator” (1971) and enliven the TV screens in Michael van den Besselaar’s “The Time Machine Series #1” (2007). Elsewhere, the figures in Paul Klee’s delicate monochrome “Harlequin” (1923) and Hannah Lupton Reinhard’s enormous, luridly colored “Lost Angel” (2023) are grouped near other artworks portraying people with similarly crooked appendages. 

The same shape is in plentiful supply in the gallery nicknamed “the elbow room” at another Philadelphia art institution, the Barnes Foundation. Closely spaced, its Picasso, a Soutine, eight works by Matisse and two by Modigliani all display a bent arm. Albert Barnes, a collector and art educator, designed such ensembles to help students understand artworks without considering the time and place of their making. 

Hubert Neumann, who admires Barnes, likewise regards his collection as an educational tool. During the Ross’s week-long installation, Neumann was on site with Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, the gallery’s inaugural faculty director. Their discussions about the spacing and relationships between the pieces helped determine the presentation of After Modernism. 

This opportunity for active involvement likely buttressed his decision to favor a one-room kunsthalle rather than a spacious museum as a venue for his highly prized collection. A Penn graduate (he attended the Wharton School), Neumann esteems the university’s art history department where Shaw co-teaches a course titled The Art of Art Collecting with her colleague Peter Decherney. 

On several occasions in recent years, Shaw has taken undergrads on field trips to Neumann’s townhouse. These outings have allowed them to engage with both a collection and an exhibition. Under her supervision, students participated in After Modernism’s curatorial process, which included researching and writing the art labels, which they’ve signed. But the collector’s high regard for Shaw only partially explains his rationale for choosing the Ross. The earlier history of the family collection has also influenced this decision.

In 1980, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago organized the collection’s first and last major surveys. Neumann remains suspicious of museum courtiers, perceiving their interest in his art as a means to secure future gifts that he has no intention of making. This distrust of curatorial admirers calls to mind W.B. Yeats’s wary honey-blond heroine Anne Gregory, who doubted her suitors’ motives, wishing that they would “love me for myself alone/ And not my yellow hair.”  

The uncertainty of the collection’s future notwithstanding, the exhibition has proven that Neumann’s collaborative experiment with the Ross is a success.

After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Family Collection continues at the Arthur Ross Gallery (University of Pennsylvania, 20 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through April 13. The exhibition was curated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, with assistance from the students in The Art of Art Collecting, co-taught with Peter Decherney.