The Met Goes Modern
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art THE MET GOES MODERN BY JAMES R. MELIOVV XJ JL JLenry's Show—as the huge exhibition, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," organized and selected by the Metropolitan Museum's...
...Geldzahler's criteria in choosing the artists, however, are worth examining...
...Even the efforts of light artist Don Flavin, about which I have certain reservations, receive the best installation I can recall...
...The show sprawls through 36 rooms recently refurbished for the occasion, most of them freshly painted in the stark museum white we have come to associate with strictly modern displays of contemporary art...
...o be sure, the standard major developments of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Op Art, minimal sculpture and color-field abstraction are all represented...
...In other words, the recent history of modern art continues to be shaped by received ideas, popular reputations, services to old friends, a sense of stagemanship (the worst example in the Met show being the darkened room in which Joseph Cornell's assemblage boxes are spotlighted like a series of precious Tiffany displays), and even the architecture of the buildings housing them (Minor talents in the small room to your left...
...The late Burgoyne Diller, for example, a geometricist who died in 1965, is given a room (albeit a small one) to himself...
...Geldzahler obviously feels the time has come to talk about the disabilities of the New York institutions that have been displaying American art thus far—the Modem, Whitney, Guggenheim, and Jewish Museums...
...On the issue of quality, I am not disposed to argue at all: It is the overall quality of the works and, curiously, the quality of the minor retrospectives of individual artists (Louis, Newman, Stella, Smith), that constitute the most impressive aspect of the show—not, as one might have expected, its critical grasp of the past three decades' art history...
...One thinks of the many handsome David Smith sculptures installed throughout the galleries—particularly in the large gallery where they are shown jointly with Frank Stella's huge shaped-canvases...
...paperback, $4.95...
...In view of such odd inclusions, it is all the more inexplicable that Louise Nevelson was excluded...
...Geldzahler concludes his essay with an interesting appeal: "Rather than devoting an inordinate amount of time to an accelerated schedule of theme shows and retrospectives, museum directors and their staffs, when concentrating on modern art, might do better to expend their greatest efforts on providing gallery after gallery of important recent works by major artists so that our students, foreign and out-of-town visitors, New York's own passionate audience for art and, most importantly, practicing artists can always have before them a collection of challenging contemporary art of the highest quality and relevance...
...T JL...
...What he seems to be calling for, then, is an ecumenical council of sorts, or at least a summit meeting of the Big Four...
...It is a goal eminently worth the best efforts of all concerned with New York art...
...Diller was, it seems to me, a very good and much underrated painter and sculptor, but he was not one of the "deflectors" of the modern tradition, and he scarcely received the critical acclaim he ought to have had during his lifetime...
...Henry's Show is still well worth the trip...
...In this way we may hope to avoid the unfortunate situation of the past three decades in which the new art has not been consistently visible...
...The uncompromising scale of contemporary work, he points out, often makes it impossible for curators to show modern American painting and sculpture in real strength...
...Aside from their cramped conditions, he goes on, New York institutions are also hampered by their heavily booked seasons (with exhibitions scheduled as much as three years in advance), making them less responsive to immediate developments...
...Bearing this in mind...
...A purist among light artists (no tricky configurations, no jazzy or seductive neon), Flavin works with ordinary fluorescent lighting fixtures carefully positioned along the walls...
...This is a notion that must be examined in relation to Geldzahler's own show...
...For one thing, it is the first time so large a body of modern American art has been consigned to the Metropolitan before rigor mortis set in...
...and not by the inherent and logical developments of an artist's work, its quality and its effect upon subsequent art...
...As a final point, he notes that the architecture of these institutions, conserving every bit of usable wall space, makes them de-dendent upon artificial lighting systems—in contrast to the skylighted second-floor galleries at the Metropolitan now housing Henry's Show...
...For the purposes of the exhibition, in fact, Geldzahler has lifted him out of semiobscurity...
...An unforutnate effect of the exhibition's dimension is that after several rooms of paintings measuring anywhere from 10 to 40 feet in width and sculptures that are equally overpowering, the work of easel painters like Edward Hopper and Milton Avery looks dwarfed and unprepossessing...
...She is one of the most important sculptors on the scene, and if her environmental sculpture walls and recent plexiglass structures have not spawned a school of imitators, she had certainly begun to receive critical attention before 1965, the cut-off date Geldzahler has established for an artist to have made his mark in the New York art world...
...It is only larger and more personal...
...These 'deflectors,' as they may be called, are those who have been crucial in redirecting the history of painting and sculpture in the past three decades...
...On Art THE MET GOES MODERN BY JAMES R. MELIOVV XJ JL JLenry's Show—as the huge exhibition, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," organized and selected by the Metropolitan Museum's curator of contemporary arts, Henry Geldzahler, is being called—is the opening gun in the Museum's centennial celebrations...
...Its demands upon gallery space force them to be highly selective...
...The same might be said of Bradlev Walker Tomlin, another good and underestimated artist, one of the New York School painters of the late '40s and early '50s...
...True enough: One could easily mount a small Cezanne retrospective in the space needed to accommodate four of Kenneth Nol-and's new horizontal stripe paintings...
...The latter's exhibits, including the 42-foot, pinstriped canvas Sangre de Cristo as well as his recent circular compositions in bright fluorescent acrylics, provide a thorough exposition of his development in the past decade and, in terms of structural rigor and economy, a perfect complement to the Smith sculptures...
...He makes it plain that the Metropolitan—heretofore noticeably reticent in the field, its exhibitions having been virtually nonexistent and its purchases negligible—is now prepared to move into the arena of contemporary American art in a big way...
...My aim has been to choose works of quality and stature by those artists who have posited the major problems and solutions of our immediate tradition...
...This goal might be achieved through the cooperation of four museums, the Modern, Guggenheim, Whitney and Metropolitan, or it might be the additive result of four separate but dovetailing programs...
...His guiding principals in deciding on the artists to include, he writes, "have been the extent to which their work has commanded critical attention or significantly deflected the course of recent art...
...Implicit in his discussion is the notion that the Metropolitan can provide just that clean well-lighted place in which modern American art can be seen to its best advantage...
...And much of the work— given the proper Lebensraum— looks marvelous...
...On display are 408 works by 43 artists, ranging from Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, who might be said to have ushered in the New Frontier in American art, to Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Ellsworth Kelly, some of the more successful reputations of the moment...
...Geld-zahler's essay indicates that this show may have ramifications for the current art scene...
...It is a stupendously scaled exhibition, the largest ever devoted to the subject of vanguard American painting and sculpture...
...Yet it is precisely the imposing size of much that is on display and the grand scale of the entire event that oblige any person interested in contemporary art to see it...
...The selection of artists and their works in the show is Geldzahler's...
...In a sense, the Metropolitan's exhibition represents a one-man's-family view of modern American art—not an altogether objectionable perspective and, arguably, as good as a committee report...
...Major statements in the grand salon, directly ahead...
...Moreover, an entire room has been devoted to 30 superb representational drawings by the contemporary color-abstractionist Ellsworth Kelly...
...A large, heavily illustrated catalogue—containing an introductory history of the American vanguard and its supporters by Geldzahler, as well as reprints of important critical essays by Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, William Rubin, Robert Rosenblum and Michael Fried—has been issued for the occasion (E...
...While these drawings show a completely unfamiliar aspect of Kelly's art, they have had little bearing upon recent trends and one wonders why they were given such prominence...
...But the choices are unaccountably erratic and do not always conform to Geldzahler's stated criteria...
...What bothers me about the exhibition, then, is that despite the resources at his command, Geldzahler's view of what he calls "the shape of our recent tradition" is no more precise than that currently being supplied by the city's other institutions and galleries...
...His large empty room at the Met has been appropriately bathed in cool white light...
...P. Dutton: hardcover, $10.00...
Vol. 52 • December 1969 • No. 24
