Glenstone to Open Iconoclasts,
Charting Breakthroughs in Art
Through Widely Recognized and Recently Acquired Works
from the Museum’s Collection
Potomac, MD, October 11, 2023—On November 9 Glenstone Museum will open Iconoclasts: Selections from Glenstone’s Collection, an exhibition celebrating developments and breakthroughs in art over the last century. The presentation will cover a range of approaches to artistic production, tracing crucial moments of experimentation that have come to define the postwar era. Through subversion, innovation, and disruption, the more than 50 artists included in Iconoclasts challenged the precedents and changed how we experience and understand art today. Drawn exclusively from Glenstone’s collection, Iconoclasts will feature an extensive selection of widely recognized masterworks that have not been shown at the museum since the opening of the Pavilions in 2018.
Starting in the 20th century, what constitutes an artwork began to be driven by an artist’s concept rather than by its execution, medium, or form. Artists’ use of language, unorthodox materials, and appropriation irreversibly changed the criteria around which we define art. Organized chronologically, the presentation allows throughlines over the past century to emerge, from conceptual questions to sociopolitical themes. This approach allows visitors to draw connections between artists like Marcel Duchamp, whose groundbreaking readymades defied ideas of authorship and originality over one hundred years ago, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose late 20th-century practice emphasizes inclusivity and expansive thinking.
Iconoclasts opens with a set of five bronze busts by Henri Matisse. Jeannette I through V illustrate the shift in representation from realism to figurative abstraction. The complete set at Glenstone is one of only four in public collections worldwide and hint at a leitmotif of the exhibition, which spotlights medium-specific innovations. These include pivotal examples of experimentation in painting, as demonstrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Other artworks by Lee Bontecou and Robert Rauschenberg question the very notions of what a painting is and how it is made.
Among the earliest works on view is Tree of Knowledge, 1913–1915, a suite of eight works on paper by the Swedish abstract artist Hilma af Klint. Acquired by Glenstone in 2022, the series belongs to the artist’s watershed 193-part cycle The Paintings for the Temple and will be presented for the first time in a museum setting.
“Beyond the ideas and moments framed by the exhibition, Iconoclasts reflects Glenstone’s collecting ethos,” shared director and chief curator Emily Wei Rales. “This exhibition expands the narrative to include perspectives from a range of political and global contexts, as well as artists working in a range of media, including photography. One notable pairing is a room of photographs by Diane Arbus and Ming Smith, each of whom used the lens to subvert the norms of image making while amplifying the stories of marginalized communities, but in vastly different ways.”
Iconoclasts also highlights a wide spectrum of innovations in sculpture, which take the form of suspended abstractions, wall-based constructions, and meticulous hand-worked objects. Artists on view, including Katharina Fritsch, Alberto Giacometti, and Robert Gober, approach scale, texture, color, and space with a viewpoint unique to their time and place.
“At Glenstone, we mine the past to examine the present and start conversations anew,” said Nora Severson Cafritz, senior director of collections. “We look forward to offering visitors the chance to compare the mystic abstraction of Hilma af Klint to the gestural intensity of Lee Krasner. The bold colors at play in the drawings of Bill Traylor resonate with the mobiles of Alexander Calder, allowing us to consider the eyes and hands of two artists who brought vastly different perspectives and life experiences to their artistic practice.”
Iconoclasts will remain on long term view in the Gallery building, allowing visitors ample opportunity for repeat and extended visits. Over time, works on view will rotate as Glenstone honors loan commitments to artists and peer institutions. This will allow other works from the collection to be cycled in, thereby generating new resonances.