Art

...Artists like Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine tried to reclaim the "sacred aura"--to quote an overquoted phrase--of things, not art...

...The pathos and weariness of the picture's black subway riders are undercut by the headline on a stray newspaper page that has fallen to the floor: "Does the Sex Urge Explain Judge Carter's Strange Disappearance...

...they see power everywhere except where it does the most harm...

...That quintessentially American conflict between self and the larger life took center stage in the work of the abstract expressionists...

...Some, like Georgia O'Keefe, with her archly macabre skulls and Orphic flowers, or her New Mexico mountains transformed into softly glowing human contours, are as widely appreciated as any European modern...

...It's ironic that abstraction, having been developed almost to the limit by European artists, should have reached its consummation in America after World War II...

...In the sixties American pop artists hurled custard pies at Apple Pie...

...interestingly, if you stand back a little from his canvases, you can begin to make out the explosive arabesques of Benton's most famous student, the abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock...

...Yet for all its shallowness, Smith's piece isn't wholly inadequate as a concluding note...

...Loose similarities yield clear contrasts, such as the one between Reginald Marsh, an American Scene painter active in the Depression, and George Bellows, a member of an earlier coterie of artists know as the Eight...

...Older influences from across the ocean, however, they warmly assimilated...

...American Life in American Art, 1900-1990," a theme-oriented show drawn from the permanent collection, celebrates the riches of the Whitney collection while seeming to make a case for the latest biennial's main emphasis...

...It's like publishing the last chapter of Dreiser's An American Tragedy without the rest of the story...

...22 November 1991:695...

...Painted one year after Jackson Pollock, Krasner's husband, drunkenly slammed his car into a tree, the picture perhaps shows Krasner's quiet gratitude for surviving the violence of Pollock's life and his death...

...The weak incongruous light that fills the canvas provides the most articulate abstract touch: you feel that in 1930, the year the painting was made, the American Dream had gotten diffused into empty space...

...Last spring's biennial was sharply criticized for a bias in favor of topical art that rawly addressed the most urgent public issues of the day, AIDS in particular...

...Divided into six galleries, the show's first half, 1900-1950, arranges work according to the themes of upper-class life, daily life and entertainments, urban landscape, rural landscape, art in the Great Depression, and art after World War II...

...But a genre boxing painting like George Bellows's well-known Dempsey and Firpo (1924) contains provocative elements...

...The stylistic pendulum rapidly swings back and forth in American art, both trends always, if unevenly, present at any given time...

...The current exhibition wants to respond that American art's central role has always been to speak to, and in some way help to resolve through clarification, hard public problems...

...The work on display, according to the curators, was selected to "explore the ways American artists documented and interpreted the political, social, and economic concerns of our century...

...While Henri's realists and the early American abstractionists around Alfred Stieglitz exhibited side by side for a time, in Europe wave after wave of abstraction drowned out realism entirely...

...With comic intent, the Paris-born, Yale-educated Marsh associates the physical and spiritual fatigue of his disenfranchised figures with sexual famishment--a piquantly intellectual version of "povertiresque...

...It even seems to imply that certain of those problems should have had the same relevance in the past as they have today...

...But the Whitney's collection and the curators' instincts carry the day and result in some inspired groupings of painting and sculpture...

...Joseph Stella's thoroughly abstract Brooklyn Bridge (1939), with its soaring arc of echoing lights that seem to catch reflections from an unseen future, attains a stronger truthfulness to the hopeful energy of a definite time and place than could a work done along realistic lines...

...Today we might call their style "povertiresque," Melville's mocking description of a picturesque ideal some novelists had of the poor and their diversions...

...Here are two figures, battered, desiccated, dead--you know why...

...In Grant Wood's triptych, Study for Breaking the Prairie (193539), a Renaissance perfection frames the regionalist nostalgia for traditional rural values and a lost Edenic innocence...

...fter abstract expressionism a playfully direct engagement with the culture animates American art...

...Behind the figure of Jack Dempsey plunging backward out of the ring (he landed in the lap of the artist, who urged him to continue fighting), a murky brown haze envelops a mass of people uniformly alike...

...The title is rich with associations...

...By the fifties, howevel, American painters and sculptors could stop looking to Europe for signs of future times...

...George Tooker's friezes of urban anomie...

...Since the sixties, American artists have lowered their expectations, yet they've become more exuberant about expressing their disillusionment...

...Paul Cadmus's comic nightmares of libidos on the loose--all these figures are examples of how steadfastly American artists cultivated their idiosyncracies the faster they absorbed European styles...

...On the other hand, in Edward Hopper's realistic Early Sunday Morning, the endless row of darkened storefronts and apartment windows becomes a barrier of desolate form eclips694: Commonweal ing the actual building it represents...

...the work of Louis Guglielmi, a surrealist with a social passion...

...Dempsey's hurtling form seems to have sprung from the audience's unconscious self, as if each person there had the identical dream of liberation from an anonymous crowd...

...The German sociologist Werner Sombart once wrote that in America, socialism would break up on the reef of apple pie...

...A visitor should take the categories lightly, follow Baudetaire's recommendation to modern painters to play theflfineur, and wander randomly...

...Well, Vel~zquez didn't know that eventually a pluralist political system would be considered a more humane idea than an absolutist one--should Spain's minister of culture go on television and apologize for all those portraits of Philip II...

...One development worth noting is that for all the freedom and inventiveness of the last thirty years the dominant artistic style is a kind of tongue-in-cheek naturalism...

...The eerie animism of Charles Burchfield, an American van Gogh...

...Others have remained underservedly obscure to the general public...

...Like the Puritans, they were reacting against the radical individualism that threatened their hopes, yet they too found themselves borrowing from its energies to fight its effects...

...By contrast to Bellows's unexpected (probably to him, too) astuteness, a surprising cynicism lurks under the surface of Reginald Marsh's Why Not Use the L? (1930...

...Led by Robert Henri, the Eight were also dubbed the "ashcan" school by some critics on account of their fascination with the less genteel aspects of city life...

...Indeed, the artistic desire to convey useful verities in a society lacking tradition or a homogeneous culture has generally made twentieth-century American realism and abstraction less realistic and less abstract than their European counterparts had been...

...But as American artists continue to pass back and forth between abstraction and realism, between transcendental longings and sardonic replies, American society will continue to demand new forms of engagement or escape, and the current artistic attitude of knowing bemusement might just become less of a pose, and start to yield real meaning out of a more genuine confusion...

...Their often tragic lives arouse a response in Lee Krasner's The Seasons (1957), where gently rounded shapes of green, pink, and egg-shell white fill a giant canvas with images of bounty and sustenance amidst change...

...Throughout the show, one senses the struggle between the art and the rising din of historical narcissism...

...In adapting European styles to the American experience, American artists, even the most modernist, paid the greatest deference to experience...

...Given space enough and time, much could be said about the stunning m61ange of styles and personalities that make up the rest of the show: from Andy Warhol to Mike Kelly...

...Artistic temperament in both works goes far deeper than subject, social moment, or style...

...In representing an atrocious consequence without its cause, Smith takes for granted a set of generic assumptions on the part of her audience...

...Brightly or darkly shining wills without city or hill, these artists literalized abstract forms by striving to connect them to universal emotions or states of mind...

...The most gifted regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton, adopted the lively decadence of a mannerist line to evoke forgotten ideals...

...Postmodernist artists perceive everything to be political except politics...

...The Hudson River School landscape painters, at work in the midnineteenth century, excoriated the country's expanding urban commercialism and depicted sublimely shining hills without a city...

...It's a good indicator of the times...

...American Art in American Life, 1900-1990" cheerfully ends with Kiki Smith's sculptures of a naked man and woman hanging on metal stands like bloody slabs of meat...

...LEE SIEGEL Lee Siegel, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is a freelance writer living in New York City...

...That experience could sometimes coalesce into colorful art movements like regionalism, whose adherents harbored a keen dislike of European influences and Eastern cities...

...A show that began with the intention of demonstrating how preoccupied American art has been with social and political realities ends in a lurid puff of concrete form and abstract emotion...

...ART TRANSCENDENTAL LONGINGS THE WHITNEY'S TWENTIETH CENTURY very other spring New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art puts on its biennial, an exhibition meant to give the public a panoramic glimpse of the art scene's cutting edge...

...David Smith's wonderful sculpture Hudson River Landscape (1951) appropriately stands at the entrance to the first gallery, which also contains work by Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner...

...There was an increasing concern with recovering objects from the sea of their mass-produced look-alikes, as if the key to salvation in America lay in contemplating a thing down to its origins instead of consuming it down to the last drop or kilowatt...

...The second half of the Whitney's show, 1950-1990, begins with abstract expressionism, the homegrown American artistic style that whisked away the mantle of the avant-garde from European shoulders...

...Early on, the show's running commentary excuses the quietly shimmering classicism of works like Charles Sheeler's industrial landscape of 1932 by explaining that Sheeler, and artists like him, didn't know about the damage industry would eventually do to the environment...

...they've grown more confident in their cynicism, and more energetic in their weary self-disclosures...

...If the regionalists distrusted city folk, urban social realists like Ben Shawn and Raphael Soyer had no sympathy for what they saw as the regionalists' escapist idylls, though both groups shared a hostility to industrial capitalism...

...Throughout this period, though, and beyond, "originals" hard to define continued to work...