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Miles Davis' "Birth of the Cool," which made jazz history almost five decades ago, is the theme of a summer show at Zurich, Switzerland's prestigious Kunsthaus Museum featuring a rare cross-section of modern American art.
For Kunsthaus curator Bice Curiger, "Birth of the Cool" coincides with the definitive emergence of an unfettered American avant-garde art that no longer looks to Paris for inspiration.
"Cool" by her definition is "emotional but controlled, serious and detached, matter-of-fact and unpretentious."
The exhibition is focused on what Ms. Curiger calls the "stellar trio" -- works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.
"All three were propelled by the will to break new ground," she says.
Physically dominating, however, are three abstract "Shadows" by Andy Warhol. Up to nearly 17 feet long, the silk-screened canvases are rare departures from his pop-art career.
Although the impact of his oeuvre is central to the show, only two works by Mr. Pollock are on exhibit.
One is an example of his famous "drip" paintings, canvases on which he dripped or poured oils in a manner which seemed chaotic but which Mr. Curiger said was "surprisingly well-controlled."
His late "The Deep," showing a huge ice floe split down the middle by a crack, is dated 1953 when Mr. Pollock was already beginning to lose his struggle with suicidal drinking and depression. He was killed in a car accident three years later.
Mr. Pollock's reputation as a leading postwar innovator in art has long since spread to Europe, which he never visited although three of his "drips" were shown at the 1950 Venice Biennale.
The top price he ever got for a painting was $8,000. Sixteen years after his death, a Pollock sold for $2 million.
"When I look at Pollock's work today, everything which followed comes to my mind, too," Mr. Curiger said at the opening. "He was an enduring source of inspiration for subsequent generations of every artistic movement conceivable."
The two canvases on exhibit by Newman, a monocled intellectual eccentric who once ran for New York mayor with a "clean air" platform, are typically flat expanses of color seared by vertical stripes.
O'Keeffe paintings that can be seen in Zurich span 44 years of her life -- she died at the age of 99. Among them is "Sky above White Clouds," a favorite motif after a three-month trip around the world by plane in 1959, when she was already 72.
Works by 11 other Americans, most of them in their 40s or 50s, complete the ambitious show compiled from loans by museums and private collections in the United States and six European countries.
Eye-catchers include Alex Katz's large-format "Night II" -- four lit windows against a black background marking a skyscraper at night. His paintings impressively convey urban "Lebensgefuehl" -- awareness of life, the curator said.
Visitors seem equally attracted by monumental portraits by Chuck Close composed of tens of thousands of pigmented pixels and by boldly colored maritime themes by British-born Malcolm Morley.
Sue Williams draws attention with recent paintings that seem cheerfully decorative at first sight. But a close look reveals the twisted ornaments to be a battlefield of bathroom graffiti on a white background.
Works by Richard Artschwager, Ross Bleckner, Vija Celmins, Richard Prince, Philip Taaffe, John Wesley and Christopher Wool also are featured in the show which ends Sept.7.
The Movement of Abstract Expressionism, which began with Mr. Pollock, Mr. Newman and others, "was the first 'style' of art that demonstrably originated in New York," says catalog author Zdenek Felix.
"Within a short time it developed into a world phenomenon," he said.
The Zurich show may seem to be grouping what is incongruous. But the individual approach is essential to the "tradition of painting," Mr. Felix says. "All of the painters in this exhibition interpret this undogmatically, poetically, and rationally."
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