A big part of Abstract Expresssionism, if we get right down to it, was to push art out of context. So yea, I appreciate it's a bit ironic for me to say that a current retrospective of the movement lacks context. The current big show at the Museum of Modern Art is really just that -- out of time, at sea, and serving purposes that are hard to grasp at first glance.
This show is something that has been on my radar for a long time, and since I live far from the city, getting there requires a bit of planning. I have been a big fan since high school, and i wrote my thesis in college about Frank O'Hara, the poet, man-about-town, and associate curator of painting at MoMA who was close to the movement.
MoMA's show pulls together a large number of highlights from the movement -- much from the museum's own collection. It is a greatest hits collection, but one that lacks a sense of nostalgia, passion or affection for the work. I've been struggling to find the right word for how all that feels -- not elegiac, nor like an obituary. It isn't a tombstone, but more of a cenotaph. At the same time, the show seems to be missing the sort of intellectual heft you'd expect from one of these once-in-a-generation reassessments. It is almost taxonomical -- this is what Abstract Expressionism is, this is who did, here are the best examples of it. It feels like the first draft of an art history textbook for high school students.
But the question of context is always right there, because it is a tricky issue when it comes to this work. Group shows about Abstract Expressionism in general seem to fail, because they don't make coherent points with each other as much as they do with themselves. Solo shows of particular artists can be brilliant. I have distinct, happy memories of shows devoted to Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, and my personal favorite, Barnett Newman. The MoMA show seems somewhat aware of this, and does a good job of tracing the development of Pollock from the student of Thomas Hart Benson to "Jack the Dripper." But everyone else seems to suffer from a selective approach.
And yet, even though Abstract Expressionism is so often a punch-line, (for the record, why do people still insist on dismissing AbEx by saying that "any four-year-old could do it?" I spend a lot of time painting with a four-year-old, and I tell you, she never does anything like this), the show was packed. Part of that is because New York museums are always packed (sorry, I'm desensitized to Berkshire museum going, which is usually blissfully quiet and solitary in the winter). So it hard to avoid the idea that this show was a crowd-pleaser, MoMA making its once-in-a-generation effort to present a comprehensive show about a movement that is intimately bound up in their own history. It is a reminder that this happened.
This is a push that comes with all kinds of interesting baggage. AbEx was the last great movement in painting, the 2-D time when art would sit still. Then Pop Art came barrelling down the road and did an unusually thorough job if wiping its predecessor off the map. Andy Warhol's soup cans and Jasper John's collages were all about context, a sharp snap back to reality after the ruminations of AbEx, which many people insisted on thinking was a big scam put on by elite city-slickers.
The memory of that kind of art, the Warhol revolution that pushed art beyond painting, and brought in almost everything, as made it the definitive step forward. After visiting the AbEx show, I wandered around the Contemporary Galleries and couldn't help notice how much different it was. There were many fewer people, but those that were there seemed to be having louder and more passionate conversations, and somehow looking harder at what was there. No one was snapping pictures, or puzzling over those damned headphones that tell you what to look at. The art itself felt so much more confrontational -- once upon a time, of course, a wall of random paint drips would have shaken my world -- but now, everything feels like an invitation to an argument.
Of course, AbEx was perhaps also the first art movement that could hard to like without "discourse," which can be alarmingly tedious. By the time I started paying attention, it had already become academic. It never seemed to me that people were very excited about what happened, and there are no pop stars or fashion designers today who talk about those artists anymore.
So while the MoMA show was curiously disappointing, another quasi-related show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Avenue was a strange reminder that it was a lively scene with people and personalities and gossip. The gallery was founded in 1950 and was an important fixture in the scene that would become known as the second generation of AbEx painters, and their friends, the poets of the "New York School." The show at the gallery is an anniversary look at the gallery, and the presiding spirit is Frank O'Hara, who figures in a number of the exhibits.
The gallery itself it on the 12th floor of a block of the Avenue, across the street from Trump Tower. The space is small and intimate, and not at all crowded when i was there. It featured some paintings by Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers. The displays included several first editions of books of poetry they produced -- which is one of the first places that published O'Hara's poetry. Most interesting for me was a video of a 15 minute documentary WNET produced about O'hara in 1966, shortly before his early death at 40. It included him collaborating with Alfred Leslie, walking around the city, reading some poems. It was a snapshot of a little world, and the people in it. There were several of O'Hara's letters on display, and they were all so insidery and gossipy that I can't imagine they would have a wide audience. Just a small one.
Shows like this are strange, I suppose this is the heart of nostalgia. Each of these movements and groups of items will go back into a box to gather dust for awhile. And in a few decades or so I'll take my grandkids to another reevaluation and try to explain to them what all this means.
This show is something that has been on my radar for a long time, and since I live far from the city, getting there requires a bit of planning. I have been a big fan since high school, and i wrote my thesis in college about Frank O'Hara, the poet, man-about-town, and associate curator of painting at MoMA who was close to the movement.
MoMA's show pulls together a large number of highlights from the movement -- much from the museum's own collection. It is a greatest hits collection, but one that lacks a sense of nostalgia, passion or affection for the work. I've been struggling to find the right word for how all that feels -- not elegiac, nor like an obituary. It isn't a tombstone, but more of a cenotaph. At the same time, the show seems to be missing the sort of intellectual heft you'd expect from one of these once-in-a-generation reassessments. It is almost taxonomical -- this is what Abstract Expressionism is, this is who did, here are the best examples of it. It feels like the first draft of an art history textbook for high school students.
But the question of context is always right there, because it is a tricky issue when it comes to this work. Group shows about Abstract Expressionism in general seem to fail, because they don't make coherent points with each other as much as they do with themselves. Solo shows of particular artists can be brilliant. I have distinct, happy memories of shows devoted to Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, and my personal favorite, Barnett Newman. The MoMA show seems somewhat aware of this, and does a good job of tracing the development of Pollock from the student of Thomas Hart Benson to "Jack the Dripper." But everyone else seems to suffer from a selective approach.
And yet, even though Abstract Expressionism is so often a punch-line, (for the record, why do people still insist on dismissing AbEx by saying that "any four-year-old could do it?" I spend a lot of time painting with a four-year-old, and I tell you, she never does anything like this), the show was packed. Part of that is because New York museums are always packed (sorry, I'm desensitized to Berkshire museum going, which is usually blissfully quiet and solitary in the winter). So it hard to avoid the idea that this show was a crowd-pleaser, MoMA making its once-in-a-generation effort to present a comprehensive show about a movement that is intimately bound up in their own history. It is a reminder that this happened.
This is a push that comes with all kinds of interesting baggage. AbEx was the last great movement in painting, the 2-D time when art would sit still. Then Pop Art came barrelling down the road and did an unusually thorough job if wiping its predecessor off the map. Andy Warhol's soup cans and Jasper John's collages were all about context, a sharp snap back to reality after the ruminations of AbEx, which many people insisted on thinking was a big scam put on by elite city-slickers.
The memory of that kind of art, the Warhol revolution that pushed art beyond painting, and brought in almost everything, as made it the definitive step forward. After visiting the AbEx show, I wandered around the Contemporary Galleries and couldn't help notice how much different it was. There were many fewer people, but those that were there seemed to be having louder and more passionate conversations, and somehow looking harder at what was there. No one was snapping pictures, or puzzling over those damned headphones that tell you what to look at. The art itself felt so much more confrontational -- once upon a time, of course, a wall of random paint drips would have shaken my world -- but now, everything feels like an invitation to an argument.
Of course, AbEx was perhaps also the first art movement that could hard to like without "discourse," which can be alarmingly tedious. By the time I started paying attention, it had already become academic. It never seemed to me that people were very excited about what happened, and there are no pop stars or fashion designers today who talk about those artists anymore.
So while the MoMA show was curiously disappointing, another quasi-related show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Avenue was a strange reminder that it was a lively scene with people and personalities and gossip. The gallery was founded in 1950 and was an important fixture in the scene that would become known as the second generation of AbEx painters, and their friends, the poets of the "New York School." The show at the gallery is an anniversary look at the gallery, and the presiding spirit is Frank O'Hara, who figures in a number of the exhibits.
The gallery itself it on the 12th floor of a block of the Avenue, across the street from Trump Tower. The space is small and intimate, and not at all crowded when i was there. It featured some paintings by Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers. The displays included several first editions of books of poetry they produced -- which is one of the first places that published O'Hara's poetry. Most interesting for me was a video of a 15 minute documentary WNET produced about O'hara in 1966, shortly before his early death at 40. It included him collaborating with Alfred Leslie, walking around the city, reading some poems. It was a snapshot of a little world, and the people in it. There were several of O'Hara's letters on display, and they were all so insidery and gossipy that I can't imagine they would have a wide audience. Just a small one.
Shows like this are strange, I suppose this is the heart of nostalgia. Each of these movements and groups of items will go back into a box to gather dust for awhile. And in a few decades or so I'll take my grandkids to another reevaluation and try to explain to them what all this means.
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