PITTSBURGH.- Abstract Art before 1950: Watercolors, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, an exhibition highlighting works by some of the abstract art movement’s most famous and pioneering practitioners, will be on view in the Scaife Works on Paper gallery at Carnegie Museum of Art from June 13–October 18, 2008. The exhibition presents abstraction as one of the defining innovations of early 20th-century avant-garde art and will feature more than 80 watercolors, drawings, collages, prints, and photographs, mostly from the museum’s collection. Many of the works are on display for the first time.

Abstract Art before 1950 was curated by Amanda Zehnder, Carnegie Museum of Art’s assistant curator of fine arts, and is organized thematically around the examination of the line that separates non-representational abstract art from figurative work. Viewers will see that genres such as landscape, still-life, architectural design, industrial or machine imagery, and figuration relate to the history and development of Abstraction. The subjects are at times very apparent visually, and at other times merely suggested by the forms in the artwork, or are made known through vehicles such as titles and historical context.

“This thematic arrangement seeks to make Abstraction more accessible and less intimidating to viewers,” says Zehnder, “Moreover, it connects the development of abstraction to certain genres, like landscape, which played an integral role in Abstraction’s creation and evolution.”

Viewers to the exhibition will encounter many of the avant-garde movements in which American, European, and Japanese abstract artists participated: Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada, Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, Sōsaku-hanga, and Early Abstract Expressionism. Those that may be unfamiliar with such movements will recognize some of the artists associated with them, including Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso (Cubism), Giacomo Balla (Futurism), and Francis Picabia (Dada). Other artists represented are Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Luke Swank, Paul Klee, Onchi Kōshirō, and Mark Rothko.

Carnegie Museum of Art’s last abstraction exhibition focusing on works on paper was in 1997.

Abstract Art before 1950: Watercolors, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs will be on view during the run of Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International, fromMay 3, 2008–January 11, 2009. The Carnegie International was conceived by Andrew Carnegie to develop the museum’s collection by the purchase of the best in contemporary art by the “old masters of tomorrow.” Several of the artists in Abstract Art before 1950 have been included in previous International exhibitions, including Georges Braque (International exhibition in 1958), Josef Albers (1958), Charles E. Burchfield (1944), and Willem de Kooning (1955).