Author Description

"For three decades, Connecticut was a true international center of innovation in the arts. Although turn-of-the-century landscape painting has been justly celebrated at the Bruce and elsewhere, the significance of the state's place in the history of 20th century modernism has gone largely unnoticed. Coinciding with the arrival from Paris in Roxbury of sculptor Alexander Calder and his wife Louisa in 1933 and the political climate in Europe, transplanted Parisian artists transformed Connecticut into a Surrealist capital-in-exile. Painter Yves Tanguy settled in Woodbury with his American wife, painter Kay Sage whose cousin, sculptor David Hare, lived near the Calders in Roxbury while Rose and André Masson moved to New Preston. Several significant artists of the Magic Realist mode, an important movement of the interwar years, also lived and worked in Connecticut: Peter Blume and his wife in Sherman, and Pavel Tchelitchew and Paul Cadmus in Weston. Recently arrived French sculptor Louise Bourgeois and her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater, bought a place in Easton in 1941. The great Armenian-born, New-York-based painter Arshile Gorky eventually moved to Roxbury. Just as the Parisian avant-garde and its American devotees were drawn to Connecticut, so were major members of the vanguard wing of German art. Artists, architects and designers who had studied and taught at the Bauhaus found their way to America after Hitler closed the school in 1933, including painting professor Josef Albers and his wife, weaver Annie Albers. They moved to Connecticut in 1950 after Josef was made chair of the design department at the Yale School of Art. Bauhaus architect and designer Marcel Breuer began teaching at Harvard in 1937. Among the students who would come under his influence were Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, John Johansen and Eliot Noyes. Collectively, they would come to be known as the Harvard Five. In fact, they might more accurately be called the New Canaan Five, s