A beacon among its contemporaries

September 11, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

In 2006, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened in a new waterfront building… (Institute of Contemporary…)

DANCE/DRAW Institute of Contemporary Art

Helen Molesworth, curator

Oct. 7-Jan. 16.

100 Northern Ave. 617-478-3100, www.icaboston.org

The Institute of Contemporary Art is celebrating its 75th anniversary this fall, and plans to do so in style. Anniversaries come and go. But for a gallery devoted to showing challenging new art by living artists, three quarters of a century is an impressive milestone.

As director Jill Medvedow asks: ‘‘What’s not to celebrate? Seventy-five years as a pioneering museum dedicated to contemporary art; 75 years of bravery and prescience in charting the course of contemporary art.’’

To mark the anniversary, the museum has lined up a bonanza of art and performance from September through December. The festivities will include a category-busting group show about the link between drawing and dance, as well as a poetic nine-screen film installation by Isaac Julien, a vast new work for the lobby by the street artist Swoon, and the first museum solo presentation of the collagist and sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

The ICA has had no fewer than 13 homes over the past 75 years. The sleek waterfront building that opened in 2006, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is only the latest. But its appearance signaled new ambition on the part of an institution that, though it had much in its past to boast about, had been languishing.

The ICA opened in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, seeing itself as a ‘‘renegade offspring’’ of the Museum of Modern Art In New York. It opened with the first survey show of Paul Gauguin in the Boston area. Salvador and Gala Dalí turned up at the first fund-raiser dressed as sharks.

The following year — 1937 — it organized, together with the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr, a groundbreaking survey of Dada. And in 1938, it was the first American museum to mount an exhibition pairing Henri Matisse with Pablo Picasso.

The ICA took a stand against Nazism in 1939, when it mounted a show of works by artists labeled as ‘‘degenerate’’ by Hitler, including Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Paul Klee. It severed ties that year with MoMA, but in 1940 it hosted MoMA’s Picasso exhibition ‘‘Picasso, Forty Years of His Art,’’ including the work ‘‘Guernica,’’ which went on to become the most famous painting of the 20th century.

The ICA mounted surveys of modern Mexican artists, of Boston Expressionists Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, and of African - American artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. It was responsible for introducing the likes of George Braque, Edvard Munch, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Laurie Anderson to local audiences.