naples art institute american modernism byron brown portrait of cubist head
Byron Browne’s Portrait of a Cubist Head (1930s)

Naples Art Institute Brings New Voices to American Modernism

Drawn from decades of collecting, this exhibition traces American Modernism through overlooked figures and unexpected connections.

by

Arts + Culture

There’s a story playing out along the walls of Naples Art Institute (NAI)—an expansive display of modern American artwork tracing the early days of European-influenced abstraction to the emergence of a distinctly American school. But it’s not the version most have heard. 

In place of de Koonings, O’Keeffes or Calders, are Brownes, Cramers and Kinzingers—names often overlooked in the telling of modern American art, yet instrumental in its shaping. 

Back in 2024, Frank Verpoorten, NAI’s executive director and the show’s curator, was invited to the home of a Naples couple who had been collecting works of modern American art for nearly five decades. Six years ago, the husband had bumped into a recently acquired Irene Zevon before having it framed, nearly tearing the piece in two. The incident led them to a restorer, who insisted they meet Frank. When the curator visited their home, he found a trove of modernism covering nearly every square inch.

The collection didn’t start as an academic pursuit or status symbol. “There was no grand plan—we started by purchasing art that we liked,” says the husband, who, with his wife, remain anonymous to keep the focus on the work. Forty-five years ago they were a young couple with no formal art background, a limited budget and a desire for art to match their taste for art deco furniture. They kept an eye out on trips abroad, in antique shops and at estate sales, picking up obscure originals that appealed to their sensibilities.

Over time, a theme emerged. “We became fascinated with the complete break from realism that artists of the era had,” he says. “The big names in cubism—Picasso, Braque, Léger—were out of our reach financially, so our collection has been built on people associated with the big names, relatively unknown artists who struggled during their careers.”  

As they acquired art, they built a library to match—deep-cut biographies and academic texts that filled in the gaps left by internet overviews and popular histories. “It’s become an obsession,” the husband says. 

The collection tells a greater story than any one artist. Now, that story goes on display with NAI’s New Ways of Seeing: American Modernism from a Private Collection, on view through July 12.

Byron Browne’s Portrait of a Cubist Head (1930s) 

“As you follow these artists, what’s fascinating is how they broke with representational art. They were being replaced by photography, so they had to find another form of creative expression,” he says. On the path to developing a distinct language for modern American art, artists abandoned realism, experimenting with cubism, psychiatry-tinged surrealism and other emerging offshoots, then merging those ideas into abstract expressionism, the first fully American form of modern art. “Some, [like Browne], went all the way through that arc.” 

In the early `30s, Browne and his contemporaries were still solidifying their own styles, pulling in influences from their counterparts in Europe.   Portrait of a Cubist Head captures this early-career experimentation with the type of fractured representation introduced by Picasso. While lesser-known than contemporaries like Burgoyne Diller and Josef Albers, Browne was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, which proved instrumental in establishing the framework and recognition for American artists in an era dominated by titans from Europe. 

“Byron Browne is one of our favorites,” the husband says. Over the years, the collectors have acquired several of his pieces, tracing from his early cubist inspirations to his saturated abstract expressionist paintings. But the couple still hasn’t been able to track down any of the artist’s earliest work, when he was a top student. “In 1928, he won the Third Hallgarten Prize for still-life composition,” the collector says. “Then, he destroyed all of his representational work.” Pictured above.

Alexander Corazzo’s Portrait (1928) 

The collectors are driven as much by curiosity as aesthetics; a name in a footnote of one artist’s biography may lead to a years-long hunt. After acquiring a piece from Munich-born artist and educator Edmund Kinzinger early in their collecting journey, the husband went on a deep dive, leading him to Kinzinger’s protege, musician-turned-painter Alexander Corazzo.  

Corazzo’s work exemplifies the cross-cultural exchange that shaped early modern American art: a French musician who emigrated to America to study art with an established German abstractionist at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota, then became a longtime collaborator with American-born artist LeRoy Turner. 

Portrait, a cubism-inflected composition only vaguely recognizable as a human bust, was completed in Corazzo’s first year studying under Kinzinger.

Paul Burlin’s Abstract-Untitled (not dated) 

“In the 1940s, after WWII—that’s when the American school came into its own, and that starts with the abstract expressionist movement,” the collector says. In that era, artists like Paul Burlin established a distinctly American style built on spontaneity, with loose, energetic forms and wide fields of color, rather than the calculated geometric forms dictated by European abstractionists. The movement was driven by a sense of rebellion—first from the institutional realism of the 19th century, then from European influence. Few embodied that more than Burlin. 

“He was a pretty rough guy,” the collector says with a chuckle. “He had a strong view of artists and how they should paint and how they should be fearless.” In his mid-20s, he was the youngest artist to present work in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, a provocative exhibit showcasing avant-garde Europeans and American outcasts who introduced the country to Modernism. To critics, it was either mockery or novelty. But for a generation of artists at the start of their careers, The Armory Show was a distilled revolution.

Belle Cramer’s Table Still Life (1954) 

While early acquisitions came from the back rooms of antique shops and estate sales, today the couple works with a dealer who helps them track down harder-to-find pieces. One artist leads to another—teachers to students, collaborators to peers—each connection widening the field.

That instinct keeps leading them to the margins and forgotten corners of modern art, often landing on women artists. Some—like Byron Browne’s wife Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne, whose work they are still trying to find—largely abandoned their practice after marriage; some took on pseudonyms; others earned acclaim in their lifetimes but have since been minimized in the telling of art history. “If you go online and search for a biography for Belle Cramer, you won’t find it,” the collector says. “There’s no catalog raisoné; there’s no history.” Yet, Cramer was hugely influential. 

A student of Paul Burlin who traveled through Europe in her early life, Cramer settled in St. Louis, where her house became a gathering place for artists, curators and collectors. “Any time our dealer calls me up and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a Belle Cramer oil, are you interested?’ I reflexively say yes,” the collector says. 

Joseph Vorst’s Thomas Hart Benton and his Family in his Studio (1940s) 

The exhibition traces various facets of American modern art, including movements taking shape in the country’s interior. “These artists were equal to many of the people working in New York and Paris, but they were unknown because of where they lived,” the collector says. “St. Louis, for example, was a hotbed of modernism in the `40s.”

Early in their collecting days, the couple befriended a St. Louis gallerist who introduced them to Joseph Vorst, an artist who represents a lesser-known subsect of the era, social realism. A sort of counter-movement to abstract expressionism, social realism responded to the era’s economic turmoil and social upheaval with humanized depictions of real people. “I bought a whole series of Vorst lithographs from the gallery,” the collector says. “I think Frank took every one [for the show] and left my hallway bare.” 

In this lithograph, Vorst captures his studio mate Thomas Hart Benton, a giant in the city who rejected his family’s affluence in pursuit of a life as a struggling artist, in the full chaos of his studio. “It’s fascinating to see Vorst tell us this story about Benton in St. Louis—not in New York, where he taught Jackson Pollock and a whole generation of midcentury artists,” the collector says.  

John Woodsum Hatch’s Victory for Joe Manila (1947) 

The modern spins on Realism appealed to the collectors, who are drawn to stories of struggle—artists scraping by, fighting for their seat at the table, challenging the world with their work, driven by the compulsion to create.  

Rendered in chalk and charcoal two years after the 1945 World War II Battle of Manila, Woodsum Hatch’s Victory for Joe Manila unfolds almost like a theatrical set piece. The foreground captures a sense of liberation—dancing figures and musicians swirling together, but a closer look reveals soldiers hobbling through the scene, locals sitting with their heads slung low, mourning great loss. Workers at the fringes of the composition hint at the labor camp conditions in the Philippines city. 

Not all modernists moved toward abstraction. Some artists stayed closer to lived experience—real people, real environments, the work of making. Liberties came in the form of distorted figures, collapsed time and space, devices used to emphasize, not obscure. 

Irene Zevon’s Crucifiction (1957) 

The genesis of New Ways of Seeing: American Modernism from a Private Collection, bringing Frank and the collectors together two years ago, Crucifiction reflects the couple’s approach—they buy what they like: fractured perspectives, a sense of rebellion, the impulse to stand and stare for hours on end waiting for clarity. “I’m still trying to find the crucifixion [referenced in the name],” he says. 

Once they started researching Irene Zevon, they found a wealth of connections, a circle of teachers, friends and mentors that included Nahum Tschacbasov, Mark Rothko and Stuart Davis. “These artists deserve more notoriety,” he says. “They are as good as many of the names you’ll see at MoMA, at The MET, at the Louvre.” 

Despite decades of research, the couple does not consider themselves art historians, but rather stewards—anonymous supporters of the forgotten voices who provided the scaffolding for today’s groundbreakers.