Last weekend, my wife and I went to New York primarily to see the de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cattelan installation at the Guggenheim (for that's what it really is), and the Will Barnet exhibition at the National Academy Museum. What we didn't expect at the Modern was the members' preview of the striking Sanja Ivekovic's retrospective and the infelicitous re-hang of its fabled art collection from 1945 to the present. Still, the de Kooning show gets pride of place.
Many extraordinary things have been said about the de Kooning show, and even though he is a truly remarkable artist, I mean extraordinary in the sense of foolish, unnecessary claims made on his behalf by critics who seem to have just discovered the man: that the show at nearly 200 objects wasn't large enough, that de Kooning's only peers in the 20th century were Picasso and Matisse, that de Kooning's late paintings are just as wonderful and authentic as the ones that came before and that in each of the seven (!) phases of his career (this in the catalog's hyperbolic introductory essay) he had explored or invented a new type of pictorial space. In regard to the latter I would point out that even Einstein needed fewer dimensions. De Kooning was wonderful almost from the start; even as a teen-ager he could draw like an angel. The visual evidence in the opening rooms makes clear his indebtedness to Picasso even if the wall texts do not; the early male and female portraits in pink and green tonalities are as impressive as anything he would do later in his career. The show is remarkable for pulling together as many pictures from the early series as possible so that the eye can easily compare the energy level and degree of distortion in both the first and second rounds of Women paintings; it is all too easy to forget that the famous Woman I and her sisters from the early 1950s represent the third group of paintings devoted to this motif. In between, from the late 1940s into 1951, de Kooning painted his great black and white abstractions; these were the works that confirmed his importance for Greenberg. It was about this time that de Kooning visited Franz Kline's studio and suggested that the younger artist use a projector to enlarge the oil drawings he had made on telephone book pages. Kline's abstract drawings from these years have the same thin, looping line as de Kooning's works on paper. To a degree I never previously appreciated, the Dutchman's black and white paintings are filled with drips and thrown paint; he and Kline and Pollock seem to be marching into the future together, de Kooning more frequently employing letters as abstract elements and usually working on a more modest scale. The arrival of Woman I in 1953 after almost two years of work ruptures the introverted gloom of the abstractions and ruptured de Kooning's relationship with Greenberg. The artist would continue to alternate between "pure" abstraction and the figure for the rest of his life, famously noting that every abstract painting cannot but help carry "a resemblance" to the real world and that oil paints were invented to paint flesh. After the room of black abstractions, it's a thrill to see all of the pictures from the third series of Women paintings on a single wall. The Whitney's picture of her on a bicycle is the closest to the powerfully small collage that precedes the series, given to MoMA by Thomas Hess and confined to a tiny wall in the previous room. Both the collage and the Whitney picture have the famous slipped (de Kooning as "glimpster") toothy smile taken from magazine pictures of pin-ups; it would have been nice to have installed the collage in closer proximity for direct comparison. The late Woman V from the Carnegie initiates her dissolution into the abstract landscapes de Kooning would paint in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These landscapes, whether "urban" like Gotham News or taken from "nature", whether painted with the wrist (de Kooning's much imitated brushstroke style) or with the "arm", are the last indisputably great works. In them one sees his process of progressive simplification as he ages, a process he would employ throughout the 1970s and 1980s; these early landscapes are first crowded with painterly incident and made with small brushes and collaged newsprint before moving on to large housepainter's brushes and the arm. By the time de Kooning starts dissolving his nudes into pink backgrounds, as if they were sinking into flesh-colored water, the paintings go limp and flaccid. de Kooning must have known this because he turned his attention to sculpture and printmaking in the 1970s and de-emphasized painting. His prints are remarkable lithographs in black and white, usually vertical, with some sense of his arm motion retained but he was not a natural sculptor; his bronzes look small and cramped, without a sense of space or scale, repetitive figurations most notable for their naked preservation of his fingerprints in the clay. When he starts painting again, thin ribbons of color, usually primaries, float on white grounds, recapitulating the process he used in tacking colored papers to the surfaces of his earliest canvases in the 1940s. The Museum of Modern Art is not a disinterested bystander in attempting to pump up the critical success of the late paintings; with the exception of a great black abstraction and Woman I, MoMA was singularly immune to the power of early de Kooning and the magnificent display in the first few rooms is highly dependent on the collections of other institutions. In this regard compare the holdings of the Art Institute in Chicago and the Hirshhorn in Washington with those of MoMA. In the last two rooms of the show, however, MoMA contributes three late paintings but the museum's advocacy won't make the paintings any better than they are. Some are attractive and some were primarily made by de Kooning without too much help from his assistants (the issue of his progressive mental decline completely ignored on the wall panels) but they are generally weak tea in comparison to the unbroken line of masterpieces from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Appropriately enough, as de Kooning ages and the work becomes more recent, his long career is compressed into fewer and fewer rooms, entire decades zoom past just like time does in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, flying by in fewer and fewer pages as the novel unspools. When we were there you could see visitors voting with their feet; once the late 1970s arrived, they headed for the exit.
Woman I, 1952
MoMA seems to be going through a kind of identity crisis, confusing its mission with that of P.S.1, the branch office in Queens devoted to more recent art. This is the only conclusion one can reach based on the recent rehanging of the "permanent" display of post-war art on the fourth floor and the selection of art from 1980 to the present in the contemporary galleries on the second floor. People come from all over the world to see the certifiable masterpieces in MoMA's incomparable collection of modern and contemporary art; the selection and display of art in this institution are a highly sought endorsement and serve an important educational purpose, one that is or should be distinctly different from that provided by a commercial gallery or small parochial collection. Thanks to Ann Tempkin's radical revision of the historical record, there are no works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke or William Kentridge, three of the world's very greatest artists, anywhere to be seen in the world's greatest modern museum (I did not thoroughly check the little ghettoes devoted to drawing and photography). Do you need to know anything more? Upstairs the Minimalism room gives equal space to the New York and West Coast varieties of this movement with the end result that Andre and Stella are separated from Judd and Flavin. There's nothing to be seen by Robert Morris and no object by Sol LeWitt, only a beautiful series of etchings somewhere else in the Conceptual gallery. Of course, so-called conceptual art is foregrounded throughout the building together with its sister persuasions of feminist and identity art. As revised and recently taught, painting has almost disappeared from post-1945 history, replaced by an entire wall of Hannah Darboven's utterly boring and endless sheets of daily ruminations. As usual there are no Color Field paintings by Louis, Noland or Olitski (a long-standing MoMA prejudice) and no hard-edged abstractions by Ellsworth Kelly (a former favorite), John McLaughlin, Richard Diebenkorn or Josef Albers, important precursors to Minimalism. Even Abstract Expressionism has been slimmed down in favor of political correctness: one painting each by Pollock, Newman and Rothko, each of whom used to have their own stunning rooms, and nothing by David Smith, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline! That's all the visitor gets. In point of fact, the list of great artists omitted from the re-hang comes to mind rather more easily than the list of those prematurely enshrined. Where as usual is Joan Mitchell? Some omissions are refreshing; I didn't mind the lack of a late Guston cartoon painting, one of the most over-used curatorial cliches of the past decade. It was good to see a pair of Richard Hamilton works in the Pop room; two Lichtensteins and two Warhols were more than enough. Hanging Rosenquist's Marilyn next to Warhol's was a nice touch, and the two Eva Hesses looked great on either side of a wonderful Joseph Beuys. But the rest of the post-Minimalist contingent looked wan and incomplete: Arte Povera was thin on the ground and one atypical early piece each by Serra and by Nauman is not enough. As usual, there was nothing by Tuttle and nothing by Christopher Wilmarth. Minimalist painting was restricted to the annointed Robert Ryman with nothing by Agnes Martin, Bob Mangold or Brice Marden (except a late work in the lobby). We had to go to the Guggenheim the next day to find a beautiful room of work by the entire group and Ellsworth Kelly. On the second floor at MoMA, the installation began with Jenny Holzer, a minor Barbara Kruger and Cady Noland. Even Cindy Sherman was not to be seen. On the whole there was a capriciousness that could not be explained except on a political basis and a sort of getting even: if you or your group have recently received a retrospective you're too well known or too good or both so forget about any space here. Of course art that seems "over-exposed" to a New York-based curator trying to be "adventurous" is often an aesthetic thrill for an international visitor or a student from our own shores. The quality of the physical installations also varied: the small room devoted to Hannah Wilke was a wonderful mini-show of this highly under-appreciated and courageous artist but who came up with the idea of making you walk through a cleared space in the middle of a rectangular floor piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, thereby splitting its physical integrity as to shape and diminishing the glitter of its silver-wrapped candy star-field. The highlight on the Second Floor had to be the recreation of Rirkrit Tiravanija's show at 303 Gallery in 1992, complete with rice cookers, refrigerator, stripped frame walls and living guide, not to mention periodic servings of Pad Thai, memorializing the birth of "Relational Aesthetics".
Rirkit Tiravanija above; Felix Gonzalez-Torres below
The general insufficiency of the art on display in the more contemporary galleries at MoMA was only further heightened by the fascinating show the Museum has given to Sanja Ivekovic, a Croatian artist previously unknown to me, who routinely deals with feminist issues and political freedom in an environment somewhat more threatening than Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. Not infrequently, great art is created in the emotional pressure cooker of political oppression and violence, this was certainly true in the case of Russian poetry, and it may be equally true here. Her survey "Sweet Violence" covers 40 years of work, beginning with videos, performances and photocollages from the 1970s, her Women's House series, ongoing from 2002, and the recent "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" (2001) outdoor installation cum brouhaha recreated with documentation and a gold-leafed statue of a pregnant woman on a soaring obelisk in the atrium at MoMA. Rarely has that despised architectural space been used nearly so well. Carol Kino in the New York Times describes Ivekovic as an anti-Abramovic because she is more political and less focussed on her own personality and on spectacle. In poster-size photographs from the "Women's House" series, appropriated ads of models wearing high-fashion sunglasses have the names and logos of the manufacturers obscured by capsule case histories of abused women; these works were plastered on walls and inserted into magazines as faux endorsements. The public nature of her work and the mix of text and image recalls Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger but the anger here is more subtly employed, diffused by elegance and luxury; in addition, the personal and the political are intertwined with an economic critique. "Rosa Luxembourg" consists of an eight foot high statue set on a 34 foot high pillar; it is named for the feminist heroine of Marxism and was originally planned for the Luxembourg square in which a similarly gilded but non-pregnant statue of Nike is located. On the original's base are quotations about the heroic war dead of the country; in Ivekovic's version the base is inscribed with "bitch", "kultur", "la justice" and other politically loaded words. From the start of her career, Ivekovic has resisted commodification and this has probably limited her visibility in the United States. This powerful show is certain to give her problems of a different order.
Two views of Ivekovic's "Rosa"
The next day we visited the National Academy of Design to take in a small retrospective for Will Barnet, painter and printmaker, given in honor of his 100th year. Barnet is still with us and even though he now uses a wheelchair, he is still painting and still comes in to Academy where he has long held forth in their school. My wife and I had never visited the Academy, even though it is fortuitously located across the street from the Guggenheim Museum, in whose metaphoric shadow it is all but invisible to most of the art-going public in New York. There was a magnificent Chamberlain sculpture in the old mansion's staircase rotunda. The Academy's collection contains many presentation pieces given by painters, sculptors and architects at the time of their election. We sampled some of the salon-hung works, including a fine William Merritt Chase portrait of a young girl against a red background (At Her Ease, 1884) and the incomparably sad yet wonderful Self-Portrait by Thomas Eakins (1902), before heading into the Barnet show. Barnet is known for his 1960s and 1970s pieces about lonely women set against New England buildings as if they were characters in an ancient Grecian frieze and for portraits of friends and family posed with wonderful cats (The Blue Robe, 1962). Before and after these popular works he has explored a polite and decorative form of abstraction linked to Steve Wheeler and the Indian Space Painters of the 1940s, an adaptation of Northwest Indian art. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Barnet was a better artist as an urban-scene painter in the 1930s and that his prints are generally superior to his paintings.There is a stiffness to his forms and an "illustrative" quality to his figures that is not enlivened by his excellent sense for subdued color. In both Barnet's realist paintings and his abstractions, the dominant emotion is a meditative calm; perhaps that is how he managed to live such a long and productive life without ever setting the wider world of art on fire.
At Her Ease by Chase above; The Blue Robe by Barnet below
Maurizio Cattelan's retrospective across the street at the Guggenheim was our last stop of the weekend. Cheekily named "All", the show contains almost every photograph, installation, super-realistic figure and taxidermy animal produced in Cattelan's career; the pieces are hung on cables and platforms from a special rig erected just below the magnificent oculus of the building's central rotunda. The artist (b.1960) claims that this installation is the last art work of his joke-filled career. Apparently he has punctured all of our pretensions and in doing so has made as much money as any one can possibly spend; Cattelan is one of the best-selling and most expensive artists in the world. My wife and I first encountered him (or an actor hired to take his place) walking around a show at MoMA in his Picasso papier-mache head and sailor costume. In good post-modernist form, the flying Picasso is here as well as a clever riff on a Serra prop piece made with a broom and bunched fabric, boring variations on Fontana's slashed canvases done in the shape of a Z for Zorro, as well as much less funny pieces showing Hitler praying in British school-boy pose, a dead J.F.K., two upside-down cops as a "memorial" to 9-11 and much much more. We began at the top of the ramp and walked our way down seeing each of his greatest hits from a new vantage point on every level. Cattelan's cleverness is just short of profundity and "All" is an excellent example of what Kimmelman calls "festivalism", the tendency for a level of art production that caters to the international exhibition scene and houses the size of McMansions. Throughout the show there were examples of little Cattelan effigies, peeking out of holes, riding tricycles, hanging from the top of a safe; these Mini-Me's are cute in a subversive way though way too reminiscent of the small version of Dr. Evil in a Mike Meyer's film. One can only hope that Cattelan is telling the truth and serious about quitting art for other pursuits; unfortunately, he has the example of Duchamp before him and the master's own publicly-announced "retirement" from art in order to play chess. The founding father of post-modernism spent almost two decades in secret working on Etant Donnes, now at the Philadelphia Museum; I am sure that Cattelan's trickster heart is planning something similar with a less salubrious outcome likely.
A characteristic piece by Cattelan above and a view of the entire installation from below
Gradient, Arcangel
Sailboats
