The Hispanic Society of America, New York City

It has been forty years since my last visit to this Museum. I am happy to report that it remains exactly as I remember having seen it all those many years ago. Happy because it retains the old style museum presentation: there are wood and glass fronted vitrines stuffed with artifacts, the paintings and the decorative arts are mixed together, and throughout the exhibition area things all seem to be on top of one another. Almost everything is dimly lighted as if there has never been an awareness here of the history of modern light bulbs. I am all in favor of this kind of thing: the United States has more than enough of those bland, antiseptic display houses that pass for museums.

The museum sits just off Broadway with its back along 155th Street. An entrance at the Broadway side takes the visitor across a paved brick courtyard to the museum building. When it was originally built the entrance was from 156th Street and the museum property filled three quarters of the length of that long city block. The campus was divided into three long horizontal parts on the width of the block. The first was a set of stairs up from the street, the next was the open courtyard and the museum then occupied the last third of the width of the block. That would make the building approximately fifty feet deep by about one hundred fifty feet long. Later constructions on either side of the building were added for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Numismatic Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian. Those latter two have moved to the former U.S. Customs House at the foot of Broadway in Battery Park. Those buildings here are empty at present and it appears that all of this has been long forgotten by the powers that be. The area of the original stairway off the street was closed many years ago and The North Building was erected there. On the Museum web site the hours for this building are posted but it is never revealed what is on exhibit there: I believe it is used for special exhibits.

Built in 1908 the building is, as was the custom in those days, Beaux Arts Classic Revival. But the interior is Spanish Renaissance. It consists of an entry room with two small stairways on either side, some rooms further off to the sides, and then one passes into the main room which has the dimensions of the exterior of the building running to the visitor’s left and right. This room is open to the skylighted ceiling and there is on the second level a gallery all around the room. The whole of the interior is covered in unglazed molded, decorative terra cotte. Had I not been told that it was Spanish Renaissance I would have thought it was English so pronounced is the sense of Robert Adam and Grinling Gibbons. The main floor is covered with three inch hexagonal terra cotte tiles and they have that beautiful soft warmth of old tile that looks like leather.

Among the decorative items there are things here that one will not see in any other museum in the City, writing desks, cabinets, etc., and in marquetry that is truly exquisite. As might be expected of a catholic culture there are many beautiful religious pieces in gold, silver, and wood. There is also a superb collection of Spanish ceramics, or as it is sometimes called, Hispano Moresque ceramics. As I have fallen in love with ceramics these past few years I was thrilled to discover this. Having seen approximately 70 American museums in the last three years, each of which has a collection of ceramics of one or another nationality, I cannot name another one that has a Hispano Moresque collection the equal of this.

In the space on the main floor under the overhead galleries there are more decorative pieces and some of the paintings. Originally there were windows in the back wall but those have been closed and on the first floor those openings now hold mounted textiles…the Moorish pieces are dazzling!

Upstairs the walls are lined with the vitrines and above them the larger paintings. There are, on view during my visit, three Goya’s and three Velasquez’s. I believe there is also the work of Ribera, Zurbaran, and Murillo…I didn’t add that in my notes. There are three by El Greco which is interesting in that his work was not “rediscovered” until just about the time this museum was built.

I was first taken to this museum by a Colombian friend who was, if nothing else, a Spanish chauvinist. He had taken it upon himself to educate me in Spanish art, claiming that it was far superior to that of the Italian Renaissance. As a person educated in the American public school system, of course I would have found it almost impossible to agree with his bias.

However, in my museum travels the past few years I have been astounded by the richness and the majesty and the poetry of the paintings from the Spanish golden age that I have encountered: on this visit I wanted to retrace the original ground. While I greatly admire the Italian Renaissance works with their translucent and dazzling colors I have now fallen in love with the rich earth tones and the golden light of classic Spanish paintings. In no other school of painting do those depicted live so deliberately and so intensely. They all seem to have what the Spanish describe as solero, soul, and they have it to the nth degree.

Unfortunately, I did not find the paintings here to be of that kind. In fact they were rather more similar to the Italian school and so I can understand why I was not so terribly impressed those many years ago.

The most renowned painting in the collection is Goya’s The Duchess of Alba. This painting was from the artist’s personal collection and there is the ongoing dispute, were they are were they not lovers. Regardless of that it is a painting which shows the mastery of the artist with its black lace skirt over a black dress and the loose and dramatic brush work of a man well up on his craft. As in all of Goya’s work there is the evident love of painting and of humanity.

Recently I have been looking at the work of Velasquez trying to understand the basis for his acclaim. Last year in Boston, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I studied his portrait of Phillip IV and tried to decide why it would be considered a great painting. It is a life size figure dressed in black, similar to a painting of another man here. The ground is a suffused light. It is simple and straight forward but there cannot be any doubt that this man, standing quietly but high above us, is The King. Facing that painting from across the room there is a similar portrait of a woman of the court painted by another artist and she stands against a wall on a tile floor. She wears so much jewelry we know she has to be wealthy. Her black dress is a master work of intricate tailoring. In sum, the painting is overly busy; it has too much information. Turning again to the Velasquez I could understand that the King was the subject of an exercise in the art of understatement.

There is a similar Velasquez painting in this museum, Portrait of a Little Girl. It is a small painting and it hangs beside and near the bottom of the full sized figure of the man. This young girl wears a simple chemise, her hair is neatly combed, her gaze is relaxed and she sits quietly and obediently for the artist. She has given him her complete attention. In the course of his work the artist has captured her essence.

The portrait hangs on the east wall of the upstairs gallery. Turning your back to it and looking across the whole of the museum and seeing the paintings of the richly costumed royal personalities and the writhing saints and the theatrical drama of the great themes reenacted in oil on canvas, you turn back to it realizing that it is the only painting of its kind in this museum. Its power is in its simplicity. As it should be for a girl this age, she is humility, charm, and innocence personified. And so that is the key, for me, of Velasquez’ art: the tremendous power of the understatement, the tremendous power of purity and simplicity. In this life that is so rare that it is surely the greatest of the great themes.

This collection was the concept and the work of Archer Milton Huntington, (1870-1955.) In addition to being fascinated by collections within museums, I am also fascinated by those we acknowledge as connoisseurs: unless one knows his subject and has extremely fine discernment, a collection can be an embarrassment. In fact, there are examples in American museums of those who bought “everything” in order to cover their bets. Sad. Because the work here is so extraordinary, I think we should want to know more about Mr. Huntington and why a person would choose, at nineteen, to be a connoisseur rather than an artist.

Since its establishment, this museum has continued to acquisition artworks. The brochure claims 15,000 prints and 176,000 photographs, none of which are on view. This makes me wonder where those items are, why they are kept in storage, (for what purpose?), and to wonder if the museum has plans to expand their facilities. If so, I would think the two empty buildings on the campus would be the logical space. As they have been empty for many years, I also wonder if there might be something wrong with those buildings?

If the museum does expand I hope they will not conform to the prevailing norm and give us a nondescript “modern” museum with an exterior designer shell: I would much prefer to see someone with the courage to continue the Old Style: a living still life rich with textures and colors.

There was an unexpected bonus in my visit: a greater understanding of Picasso. We know that Picasso was a Spanish artist but he is so identified with the school of Paris that we sometimes forget that. This has to do as well with our own lack of knowledge regarding Spanish art. But having just read three volumes of the Richardson biography I know that when in Spain Picasso traveled extensively to see Spanish museums. In this museum I believe I can see what he might have seen there.

An artist well represented here, and one I do not care for, Sorolla, exemplifies for me the decadent end of the western tradition. Having mastered that tradition at the age of fourteen, I can imagine that Picasso might have had somewhat the same response to Sorolla’s work. He then asked himself, as an artist, where can I go, what can I do? There were abundant examples in Spanish art to show him the way forward.

For example: on a column behind The Duchess of Alba there is a small, six by nine inch, carved wood panel, Christ Bearing the Cross. The cross is on a diagonal across the top of the format, the figure is weighed down, the knees are bent, and the head rolls back. The body fills the format. The cross is across the shoulders but the right arm, supporting it, seems to rise out of the head. Anatomically it is wrong but compositionally it is right. On the column next over there is a depiction of one of the female saints. The folds of her skirt have the sharp accordion geometry of a folded paper fan. In both of these works we can see the human figure as expressive form just as Picasso used it. And we can also see in these details that there are similarities in works that Picasso made.

Under the overhead east gallery there are two marble tombs which were originally quite tall. In order to show the whole of them within this reduced space, they have been dismantled and the various components have been reassembled as an artwork within a new format. If Picasso had seen something like this in a Spanish museum it can be understood as one of the inspirations for cubism as well as his later work with its dislocations and reassignments.

But the strongest influence is in the ceramics. In particular, on one of the chargers, against a geometric Moorish ground, a cobalt blue line meanders until it returns to its starting point and concludes the silhouette of a bull. The head of that bull turns his face to look at us wide eyed with wonder. That painted line is pure Picasso…just as there is so much in this museum that calls him to mind. Yes, he is first and foremost a Spanish painter and if we do not recognize that the fault is ours. It is interesting that while an awareness of his presence is so constant here, there is not one of his works on view. Hispanic Society? Shame. Shame. Shame.

http://www.hispanicsociety.org/

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City: Sejima+Nishizawa/SANAA

Back in the 1980’s when the art world was awash with loose money and names and reputations were being made on a daily basis by the mere opening of arriviste designer handbags, and considering the art that was achieving success and renown, mostly works executed overnight in East Village cold water flats in shades of day glow orange and chartreuse, with nary an indication of draftsmanship, or, if so, the worse the better, so it seemed to me, I made the decision to remove myself from this too, too heady environment. Thus I have missed knowing first hand almost all of the history of what has come to be known as Contemporary Art. Reading in a recent New York Times article that a New Museum of Contemporary Art had opened I thought I should wander down to one of my old stomping grounds, The Bowery, to check it out. Doing some research on their web site I was astonished to learn that the museum has been in existence, in one setting or another, some thirty years.

The photographs of the new building were rather impressive and the Times had many nice things to say about the venue. But that made me somewhat wary as I have discerned of late that the Times has something nice to say about every art venue in the City. It has made we wonder if perhaps they have joined the tourist industry alliance known as the CVB, The Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, one of which every self promoting American city now has. (When times are tough the tough hang together for those Yankee dollars.) On the other hand the present crop of Times reporters might very well be the sons and daughters of those moneyed art collectors of the 80’s and perhaps they simply don’t know any better, even with the overlay of their many MFA’s.

From the outside the museum is a stack of rectangular boxes shifted off-axis around a central core, the elevator shaft. In silhouette it looks like a generic, vertical slice of the New York skyline. Whereas the museum guide states that this off-axis provides a variety of open and fluid galleries, the three galleries are in fact each like the others but in different dimensions. From the elevator one enters each rectangular gallery in exactly the same way and sees in each a polished cement floor and soft off white standard museum walls. Because this area of the Bowery is the center for the restaurant supply business, the origin of the High Tech look of the seventies when neighboring SoHo first took off as the art center in New York, acknowledgement of that industrial presence has been made…there are no fine materials here, nor is there any designer chic.

The interior of the elevator is chartreuse. It is a rather jolting surprise when the doors open. But because the rest of the building is so conservative and so “old style” in the standard new museum vernacular, it made me want to laugh. If the management is so fond of chartreuse, I was sorry they had not hired Rem Koolhaus. His Seattle Public Library is one of the great buildings in America. It is twelve stories high; it has no walls, no doors, and no windows. (Only Rem Koolhaus could figure that one out and make it happen.) As in this building, all of the fittings in that building are standard supply house issue. There is no opulence in the material or the in impression created. But where he uses red the red is used as both design and decoration. Where he uses orange the orange is both design and decoration. And where he uses chartreuse the chartreuse is both design and decoration. It does not shock, it celebrates: Rem Koolhaus is a man who knows what to do with chartreuse. Needless to say I found a cement and off white building with a chartreuse elevator extremely pale by comparison and, as I have said, laughable, with mirth rather than derision.

The exterior of this building is covered by a mesh that looks to be stainless steel somewhat reminiscent of a chain link fence. Rem Koolhaus draped a diamond lattice of 2 by 6 inch I-beams over the whole of his space, (his library is not a building but a defined space), twelve stories high by one block square at ground level. This museum building creates the impression of coolness and soft reverence: Koolhaus throws caution to the wind. This building has settled into place…on the Bowery. At The Seattle Public Library the future has arrived.

As with the new Morgan Library and Museum I am once again perplexed why so much time and work would go to making a building that has such limited gallery space. There are only three here in a building with seven floors. (Because museum floors have high ceilings, this translates to about fourteen stories.) The gallery showing the work of Tomma Abts has fifteen painting each 15 by 18 inches. They almost fill the gallery and I cannot image that much more work than this could have been displayed, or that many very large works could be accommodated. The public spaces on the street level are small, minimalist and comfortable, and I am happy to report that the coffee bar has, for a museum dining experience, less pretension, thank goodness, than the average SoHo eatery just a few blocks west.

The most interesting and exciting architectural moment at this museum is in the stairway leading from the fourth floor gallery to the third, or vice versa depending on your route of travel. Every new museum of art being built these days has one area, usually the atrium, in which the architects are allowed to develop a space which is a statement of pure architecture. I understand architecture as an intellectual discipline in which three components, form, scale, and proportion are employed to define a space, that space generally understood to have a function which the form then follows. When the atrium is not the moment, it is sometimes a stairway, and that stairway is not always on the main path, as were the Grand Staircases of the museums of the Beaux Arts era, but a private moment tucked away for the adventurous visitor and the exploring mind. The best of that lot is a stairway at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art: rising in a straight run in six stages it is all elegance all the time.

In this museum the stairway is only about three or four feet wide in two long flights with one landing. In keeping with the low income working class character of the neighborhood, the steps are cement, the walls are painted white, and the railing is standard industrial pipe railing. As with all great architecture this is wonderful because of the dimensions and the proportions. Here the proportions are exquisite made all the more exciting by the narrowness and the pitch. Giving it a sudden and unexpected moment of bliss is a large window on the landing with a frank and open view onto the roof of the commercial/industrial building next door…a standard New York City tar papered rooftop. The contrast of that to this white interior space is delightful. Seeing it, I thought how wonderful it would be to pass this window and to see the people who live in that building sun bathing in the nude, in the sense of being a living tableau. It made me aware that in New York City one is able to live an anonymous life but that one has no privacy whatsoever. (That does not, however, stop some New Yorkers from sun bathing nude.)

The architects are Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA. A nice exhibition of their work and working method is shown at the back of the street level floor behind the café. It appears that they have embraced the rectangular box as their signature shape and their work shows a preoccupation for arranging the boxes in various configurations, both horizontally and vertically, as attached or separated entities. Considering that for the last one hundred years reinforced concrete has made it possible to make buildings in any shape whatsoever, I am always mystified why architects continue to think…inside the box. I am also perplexed why an architect would make a building that blends with its neighbors when those neighbors are industrial suppliers and skid row flop houses. (And so obviously en route to being eradicated by the visibly rising wave of the next generation.) At the beginning of the twentieth century architects were shouting: “Come! Let me lead you to the future!” Recently built American museums indicate that architects have become the Uriah Heeps of the corporate sponsors.

If museums of modern and contemporary art want to impress the public with their modern and contemporary sensibilities I would suggest that they start by commissioning buildings that look other than as if they had been Made Yesterday. To that end I suspect that they will have to educate their corporate backers, those rigid guardians of the discrete and conservative architectural utterance, to an awareness that architecture can be, and should be, something more than merely an inoffensive, nondescript rectangular box, whether at attention, in recline, or askew.

http://www.newmuseum.org/about/new_building/

Compare the “new” museum to this old Seattle Library.
http://www.spl.org/images/slideshow/slideshow.asp

The New Museum of Contemporary Art New York City: The Current Exhibitions

In their literature the New Museum states that the focus from their inception has been on new art, new work that falls somewhere between that seen in a grass roots alternative spaces and recent work in museums that shows a correspondence to historical values, or, we might say, that which shows its relationship to the linear progression of western art. For some time I have been attempting to understand contemporary art and while I find this definition vague it is somewhat more helpful than that of the San Francisco Museum of Modern art which defines contemporary art as that created since 1975.

In one of the newspaper commentaries about The New Museum it was stated that there is no interest here in bourgeois art.

Based on these few readings I realized that I would have to define for my own understanding “new” and “bourgeois”.

In every small town in America, and even in the Greenwich Village Outdoor Art Show, one can find art exhibitions featuring classic subjects: landscape, still life, portraiture, and abstraction. Because they are recently made, however, does not make them “new”, but because their appeal is primarily to middle class buyers it does make them pretty much “bourgeois”.

But when considering the art of the twentieth century and especially from the heady days of New York in the 70’s and 80’s where so much art was heavily promoted to upper middle class and wealthy buyers, almost all the artists in uptown museums who have made their livelihood producing commercially successful works with a single signature image might be understood now as bourgeois artists. Those would be the artworks promoted as having historical values, made by artists who have produced work self consciously within the western tradition, and would include Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al. The art from the first half of the Twentieth Century, when exploration of the nature of the picture space was the primary concern of the artists, can be understood as “new” art, an overview of which we can find in Robert Hughes’ book, The Shock of the New, 1980. But because that art is of the recent past it is of course no longer new and so it is more correctly …Modern.

There is always the disclaimer that the new art is that in which the artist’s vision gives us a new perception of the world around us, whether of the exterior or the interior of that world. In some venues it is claimed that contemporary art gives us the familiar but in new arrangements.

Having had these things under consideration for some time I have come to this conclusion: Traditional western art was existential in that it was concerned with the things of the earth; landscape, still life, and portraiture and their “meaning”. Modern art was expressive of the metaphysical and was concerned with the interior experience and meaning, whether spiritual or psychological. Contemporary art has returned to the existential view that the thing presented is but the thing itself with the difference that it often has no deeper meaning or significance.

In trying to determine if a new artwork is “art” I would think that there should be as well something about the work that indicated that the artist had an art education, or that he understood the fine arts, or that he has mastered the craft of his medium, so that his work is not confused with contemporary folk art or outsider art. (It would also help if we were to attempt to make some distinction between fine art and decoration.) But I don’t know how that would be achieved without referencing historic values. Alfred Barnes says that all great art works have in common a certain quality and I understand him to mean that those works have achieved a degree of excellence in their making. Perhaps that sense of excellence would replace a sense of historic value, or art education.

I suppose there is a need for a museum of new art, although I suspect it is not a really pressing issue. Art is going to change; it always does. It will change because the world changes. And I am convinced that when art changes it will be because an artist has presented works that have a unique form based on his vision. This might very well be art work that is the result of a conscious effort to produce the new: specifically I think of Kurt Schwitters who collected the detritus of a war ravaged society determined to make a new art from it.

Rather than take the reactionary, exclusionary stance of art venues in the past, the New Museum announces that it stands at an open door ready for what is to come. That is their mission statement. But I am not completely convinced that that will be their practice; their architecturally conservative, recently made building seems to indicate that the traditional view of business as usual will likely prevail.

Certainly none of the four artists currently exhibited at this museum represent anything so very new in their work. In fact all of it has the look of second year student work, and from not one of the better art schools.

The most interesting works are those made by Steven Shearer. Mr. Shearer is apparently compulsive about downloading images from the internet. In some works these small color photographs are arranged on large white formats, about four by six or eight feet, in other than rigid patterns but achieving the look, from across the room, of patchwork quilts. On closer view these are not collage but large giclee prints. While I admired the quilt effect I was more interested in the technology than the use made of it.

He has also given us a number of portraits of men with long hair which obscures their faces. Some of these are made in blue ball point pen and have an interest in being a new use of a common marking device, but the draftsmanship does not transcend the art school level of accomplishment. (I suspect some of these are tracings.) In oil paintings of the same subjects there is an implied reach for new color sensibility and combinations but even though the results are other than those of paintings with historical values, they have a too obvious allegiance to prevailing East Village norms.

Artwork made using light is a common experience in every museum of modern, contemporary, and installation art and the work included in this show adds nothing to what has already been seen elsewhere and everywhere. Nor does the two pages of small print explaining the intellectual subtleties of these works or their relationship to the linear progression of western art elevate them to a level of more interest than they first appear to have. Nor do I understand, after the museum’s preface, why I should admire works “in the tradition” when I had been lead to understand that the museum was only interested in works that have other than those concerns.

The small abstract, non representational paintings of Tomma Abts occasioned two observations. One: from a distance her works appear to be merely two dimensional patterns in some interesting color combinations, but on walking closer to them one sees painted shadows and highlights and up close there is a sense of three dimensions, as opposed to more traditional art which has a sense of deep picture space from the aesthetic distance but which on closer view is seen to be merely color applied in daubs, points, or blends.

Secondly, I had first seen these on the internet, courtesy of The New York Times, and I was very taken by the high chromaticity of the colors. In the gallery there is quite the opposite effect: the chroma is much lower and the sense of translucency is completely lacking. If anything the paintings look opaque from having been over worked. They also look as if the making of them had been a very tedious process. (I am not one to confuse tedium with mastery.) They are really on the borderline of the obsessive/compulsive work of outsiders, but not as interesting without that something irrepressible that wants to be said or that something unspeakable that cannot be repressed. I am sometimes shocked by the slap dash presence and finish of Matisse and Picasso’s works but those paintings do have a sense of vibrancy and energy that is totally missing here.

Despite my being not favorably impressed by this work I am appreciative that the artists represented are from four different countries. If the New York art world needs anything it is the breath of fresh air that will come from being less geocentric than it has been for the last fifty years. I truly suspect that what it has self promoted all this long while is nowhere near as important as we have been lead to believe. From that regard this policy of The New Museum is a welcome sign.

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions

In the meantime, for those with an interest in new art I suggest looking in on two of the best venues in the country; The Blue Star Center of Contemporary Art in San Antonio and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate the works posted on the internet here:http://www.bluestarart.org/info.html

Don’t miss the James Turrell work here. He is the present master of using light to make new art. His work at this museum is very inspiring: http://www.mattress.org/index.cfm?event=Exhibitions&c=Permanent

Morgan Library and Museum The Renzo Piano Expansion

Morgan Library.

In his history of museums, The Museum Age, Germain Bazin, former Curator of the Louvre, tells us that museums came into being because man has been an inveterate collector from his earliest recorded history. Prior to there being museums there were temples with offerings and there were private collections. Collectors who had great pride in their accomplishments and who wanted to share their treasures have almost always opened their collections to the public. When collections were merged and placed in a common building, the museum as we know it was born.

One of the great joys of the New York City art scene is that it has had examples of the spirit of collecting in many manifestations. Of the cabinet, or small personal collection, The Morgan Library and the Frick Collection have been the exemplars.

I made my first visit to the Morgan Library in the early 1960’s. Being an avid reader and a lover of books, I wanted to get some idea where my penchant for buying first editions at Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, for one dollar each in those days, was leading me. The entrance was in the center of the building on the corner of Madison and 36th Street, and one passed through the reception area, now The Marble Court, to a hallway that lead over to the library itself further east along 36th. In that hallway there was a display of some of the artwork from the collection: manuscripts, drawings, and maps. But as I recall, the primary attraction of the venue was the physical library, 1906, which is one of the stellar American examples of reproduction European architecture, Italian Renaissance.

In later years I recall there being a gallery along the backside of the long hallway, then a gallery I had not known about was opened just to the left in the entry building, and somewhat later a new gallery and garden were opened in the space between the two buildings and those buildings on 37th Street. Thus over the years I have seen the Morgan evolve from what I had thought was primarily an architectural entity to a cabinet of antique works.

For several reasons I have been slow about getting in to the City to see all the latest in museum offerings these past few years. I have just now made my first visit to the New Morgan Library and Museum. You will note that the name of the venue has now been extended; the several areas of collecting are now offered as “a small museum”.

The new focus has occasioned a major building reconceptualization as well by the noted international architect, Renzo Piano, who is the undisputed man of the hour in museum reconceptualizations. What he has wrought is lovely but I am sorry to find that this is the direction the project has gone.

In essence Sr. Piano has maintained the two early twentieth century buildings, the library and the annex building, and has removed all of the other additions and reconfigurations, as well as the Morgan House on Madison Avenue, a late nineteenth century brownstone mansion. The brownstone on the corner of Madison and 37th has been left in place.

The space of the former house is now the entry and the whole of the space between the buildings on 36th and 37th has been covered with an International Style structure that encloses Gilbert Court, a piazza, a large communal meeting place. As I have said, this is lovely. However, as with most recent museum rebuilding there appears to be more public space than expanded gallery spaces. The Morgan claims that the exhibition space has been doubled, but not all that much considering the space that is available to them, and there is increased storage space and a concert stage as well.

My criticism of the piazza, the entry, and the two new restaurants, is that I feel they have subsumed the original two buildings and the function of the venue. By shifting the entry to Madison Avenue the buildings on 36th Street are not seen when approaching the museum. As a result the visitor does not carry that image into the interior: their exterior identity, their architectural presence, has been eliminated as well. They now have the presence of historic rooms inside a museum building. In addition and in comparison to the newly defined space both the library and the gallery building now seem small, as indeed, in New York City, they are. The effect is similar to that of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in which Ancient Egypt meets the International Style, with the latter holding the winning hand.

But I think the best way to make this understandable is to question why the Morgan thought it needed not one but two restaurants. (Granted, they are both small.) Whereas some museums once offered food in a cafeteria, almost every American museum now boasts of a gourmet dining experience. Despite the claim, in all of these restaurants the food is no better than standard mediocre restaurant fare. (I did not sample the bill of fare here.)

At the most, a visitor to the Morgan needs not more than two hours to see the present offerings. Inviting the public to stay and sit to dinner, at outrageous museum restaurant prices, adds a function and a cost to the concept of the cabinet that eliminates that concept. In a very strong sense the newly defined areas have become the attraction and the original library, galleries, and collections the incidentals.

The sense of this loss of concept can be seen as well in the lower floor where, in a large, open space, in reality the lobby for the concert theatre, (60’s modern, with cherry wood and bright red seats, this concert hall is a fourth design style within the museum), an exhibition of drawings and photographs of the architectural project has been placed on two walls and glass vitrines have been pushed up against two other walls across the large room. These displays look not like planning so much as two after thoughts.

There are two new but extremely small galleries. The Englehard Gallery, on the second floor above the entry, is the larger and might be just the right size for the exhibition I saw there, manuscripts and drawings by, for the most part, contemporary writers. But the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery, on the first floor is so small as to raise the question, why was it made? As an architectural entity it is “right”: it is a perfect cube resting in the space between the two original buildings. The limited exhibition space that it contains however makes it feel even smaller than it is. (It measures 20 by 20 by 20 feet.) Hence, I suspect its real function is to serve as an architectural screen masking the piazza from the 36th Street view. Making that space a gallery is a good solution as to what to do with a structure once it was there, but as a gallery, it feels decidedly detached. As a result, that enhances the awareness that all of the galleries are now disconnected. This is also emphasized by the fact that, standing in the piazza, it is not readily apparent where the galleries are: even with a plan in hand, one has to ask.

From the architectural perspective, the cube was used because of its reference to the Italian Renaissance estudiolo, a concept I have seen in the petite museum designed by Cesar Pelli at the side of his Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. In both buildings their strongly perceived smallness overcomes the beauty of the geometric purity. On the inside both of these buildings induce claustrophobia. It’s a nice thought but I have yet to see it successfully adapted to modern use.

It has become the accepted wisdom that museums must give evidence of their commitment to growth, that they must change, and that they must have an ever larger plant. Why this is considered wisdom I do not know. Had the Morgan stayed as it was I would have been perfectly happy to continue to see their wonderful exhibitions, exhibitions unlike those offered in any other venue. I consider it a great loss to the museum going public that the example they provided, of the cabinet, has now been eradicated. I thought it had a perfectly legitimate raison d’etre.

Of the architectural details of the covered piazza I was extremely impressed by the simplicity of the essential post and beam construction, (three posts on each of the two sides) and especially by the posts. Some of these rise without interruption from the lower floors to the roof, probably 70 feet or so. And rather than being I-beams or square steel columns the square form has been opened up so that each is four angle irons of ninety degrees with the folded edges touching in the center. That open form lends a sense of lightness and gracefulness to the whole structure.

There are two glass elevators in the piazza for the Engelhard Gallery on the second level, the offices on the third, and the concert hall on the lower floor. The upper spaces are closed to the view from the main floor and the elevators are accessed by platforms that appear to be cantilevered off those walls. Their excitement is augmented by glass parapets. As much as I like these components, in considering the whole of the piazza space, I feel that their presence in that space is intrusive. Had the elevators opened directly into those galleries and offices, their being glass elevators would have provided that sense of excitement. But that would have interrupted the pedestrian flow from the entrance on the lobby floor, it would have necessitated a reconfiguration of the elevator exit in the basement, and so the shift in orientation was made. This has resulted in a dead space behind them between the two restaurants. As they stand the elevators seem either misplaced or gratuitous.

On the exterior I admire that the new entry was painted to match the stone of the older Vermont granite buildings. But I very much disliked the solid surface above the glass entry way. While I admire a blank space, this had a too strong resemblance to those flat surfaces applied in the fifties as remodeling over earlier architectural facades. There are still many examples of this just down the block on 34th Street.

It was nice to see the museum acknowledge the architect with an exhibition giving the history of the institution and with his designs for the new addition. To my knowledge, of all the many new museums built recently in America, only the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Worth has exhibited drawings of the architect’s development of the space. Especially noteworthy here is the model of the project made in a Parisian studio. It is one of the great architectural models. It includes all of the various buildings with just enough architectural detail to give it a nice texture without lapsing into a compulsive episode. One reason it works so well is that all of the various stylistic components are rendered in the same honey-colored wood giving the whole a unity that the new museum itself does not have: whereas this is “a model” seen from the outside, the exterior of the Morgan is now seen from only one side and now reads, from the inside, as a central court with “some stone doorways”

A loss of personality is not an enhancement.

The Library and Museum Plan:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/campus.asp

Photographs of the campus:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/press/TEArchitectureImages.pdf

Close Encounters Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers at the Morgan Library and Museum

This group of black and white portraits by Irving Penn, purchased in 2007, is this museum’s first acquisition of photographs. Inside the International Style piazza they seem comfortably at home even though they represent a very different area of collecting for the Morgan. Despite photography having been accorded the status of fine art for many years it still only receives token acknowledgement in museums. In these photographs there is great attention to composition, lighting, sharpness of image, and tonal values. These are beautiful, flawless prints. By not elucidating any of this with its first photographic exhibition, the Morgan has missed the perfect opportunity to expand the understanding of the discipline and of its audience.

Most of them were made for Vogue. Because the subjects are famous artists of the mid to late 20th Century, because we can assume that they lead busy lives and that their time was valuable, we are left to infer that these works are important because the subjects considered the photographer to have been a famous artist and person as well.

When we are introduced to a person, or in conversation with another, we make eye contact. When we see a portrait, whether painted or photographed, we immediately make eye contact as well in order to ascertain the character of the person depicted. In viewing portraits this human response can cause us to judge the works by that character as we interpret it, while overlooking them as artworks: it is only when the subject’s eyes are not seen that we can more easily see the whole of the design and the artistry within the format.

I would suspect that Irving Penn agreed with that. It might explain why, once he had placed his subjects in front of his camera, he then waited a good long time before tripping the shutter.

In many of these photographs the subjects have not only relaxed, they have grown weary of the experience. The only thing that seems to keep them in place is their commitment to being photographed. Many of them seem perplexed and to regret that they have agreed to the project. In each of them there is the stillness of the studio in which they were made. Throughout almost all of these portraits there is an almost palpable sense of tedium. When considering: “What is expressed”, that pervasive sense of tedium is found to be stronger than the character of the persons portrayed. It is enhanced by the consistently bland and gray environments. Thus Penn has succeeded in making unusual and disturbing images of persons that overcome the propensity for eye contact. These are not portraits but Photographs Made by Irving Penn in the same way that Picasso’s pen and ink drawing is a drawing by Picasso rather than a portrait of Stravinski.

Each of these persons, as a successful artist, has for the readers of Vogue a recognizable persona. Not everyone with a recognizable public image wants to reveal much more of himself beyond that. By allowing them to just stand there many of them have let go of some degree of that persona: Georgia O’Keefe who, let us not forget, has posed for Stieglitz, seems more impatient and cranky than one might have suspected she could be.

But this is not always the case: Saul Steinberg, seen looking into the camera, into our eyes, is drawing a self portrait and seems absolutely intent on delighting in his artist’s persona every waking moment of his day.

In a double portrait Fredrick Kiesler has grown bored and has bowed his head and turned inwardly to his own thoughts while his companion, William de Kooning, continues to hold his pose with such professionalism and respect that the long ash on his cigarette does not fall. This photograph is initially amusing and disturbing and then, ultimately, neither…there is not enough here to sustain the viewer’s interest. In the brochure the Morgan directs our attention to the cuffs of the shirt sleeves and to a cuff link: my point precisely.

In the photographs in which the subject looks away from the camera the personality of the subject is of no interest to the photographer at all. In an extreme close up Somerset Maugham’s face looks like old meat. It evokes a very visceral response in the viewer. But this seems not so much the concept of the found photograph as purposeful: in the portrait of Louise Bourgeoise the subject is her dry, wrinkled, heavily textured old skin. Only by having placed the light just so could that texture have been emphasized on film.

In that photograph other aspects of Penn’s method become evident. The extreme black of her shoulder, toward the camera, seems not to result from the light having been flagged off the subject in the studio but from manipulation, burning in, in the printing. In the portrait of Phillip Roth in which his neck rises out of his turned up collar, one realizes that his shoulders, which should be seen, are not and a closer examination of the print indicates that they have been blurred into the ground. Whether this was done to the negative, during printing, or to the print I would not know, but it enhances the awareness that in the studio and in the dark room Penn was a man much given to manipulation and control. As those are generally not admirable human qualities, that awareness adds a rather cold and dark layer to these works.

Exploring this aspect of the work one begins to realize that almost all of these photographs lack spontaneity. This is not a photographer who would capture a moment within a movement such as a Frenchman leaping over a puddle. Many are overworked to the point of being contrived. Because contrivance is so deadly and antithetical to art, one begins to question Penn’s technique. Is the too obvious manipulation a stylistic device meant to be seen or is it an excess of which he is unaware? Has the photographer placed himself front and center, as in those works by other artists bearing the title: The Artist and His Model, or has he assumed the central position through the expression of his own egoism?

Jasper Johns is the only subject to appear in two photographs. In the first, 1964, he is a rather bland young man newly arrived to fame. In the second, 2006, he is The Picture of Dorian Gray. While that could be read as the photographer’s interpretation of the subject’s character and life experience, because the composition is so rigid and the lighting so unusual and so controlled, it reads rather as the photographer using the subject in order to make a photograph that defines his stylistic approach in disregard of the subject’s personality. Why then use a person who has name recognition?

In others the camera is so close it distorts the shape of the head. This was not done to better depict the personality of that person but only for the purpose of making a striking image: anyone could have been the subject of those photographs. That the subject and the photographer were celebrities gives the works an importance, to the readers of Vogue, that they would not have if both persons were unknown.

As one of the house organs for the social set, Vogue had a status amongst the initiates that was not shared by those outside that world. To an outsider the world of Vogue was a hybrid world, a world which placed much importance on being seen, in what, and with whom. To the outsider these Vogue photographs would seem to be hybrids without universal significance. Admitting their possibly limited appeal, one questions the status of the photographer: whereas his images seemingly minimize the celebrity status of his subjects, in the end these photographs, made for Vogue, can be seen to have come into existence only because of the celebrity status of all concerned. The shift from portraiture to enigmatic image is only an editorial, stylistic device that establishes that equality.

Considered all together these photographs can be understood as a group portrait of a social class. This world seems cold and uninviting; celebrity is presented as a tedious, trivial, and unenviable attainment. Was that the intention? Were the sitters in agreement with that or has their confidence been betrayed? In many of them I feel it is the latter. It is because of that perceived disrespect that I find these photographs disturbing.


http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/penn.asp

Jasper Johns: Gray

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

When I saw the announcement for this exhibition I was very excited and eager to see it. On my tour of American museums in 2005 I saw the very impressive “Near the Lagoon” (Catenary) at the Chicago Art Institute, the less than impressive “Fools House” at the Walker, and the lithographs “Alphabet” in Seattle and “No” in Tucson. In addition I saw the exhibition, “Jasper Johns; Forty years of Printmaking” at the De Young in San Francisco. I have always had a fondness for gray and have often pointed out to others the pale traces of color that are discernable in an overcast sky and in the landscape of an otherwise gray day. That ability to see those colors might have come from my admiration for the works of Corot. After the trip, impressed by his mutual affinity for gray, I determined that I would do some further study and become more familiar with Jasper Johns’ work

I lived in New York City from 1959 to 1988 and the name Jasper Johns was known to me. I know I had seen Flag and Target, but other than recognizing the name I had never paid much attention to his work. Seeing variations of those familiar works on my trip I gave them more time than I usually have done and I was very impressed that Johns was such a painterly painter.

It is with great sadness then that I have to say I found this exhibition really disappointing: except for “Catenary”, most of the work here is not interesting. This opens in a small gallery with “False Start”, an abstract in color with stenciled color names. Next to it is a variation in grays, “Jubilee”. Both of these are extremely well done, they show a mastery of craft and a cleverness of conception. However, in the next gallery we were presented with some very early works from the sixties that had the look of having been student work on inexpensive materials. I wondered if they might not have been included in order to pad out the exhibition.

The interpretation states that in the gray works the artist was creating work which removed the emotional values associated with color and that it was intended to focus the viewer on the concept and the craft of the process. In the third gallery, works in the Alphabet series, this is all readily apparent, it makes its point, and I fully expected that the remaining work, executed over a forty year period, would go somewhere beyond this. But it did not. Instead the work took on the character of an extension of something that was of only minor interest in its conception, something one might do in his off hours or as an exercise to “keep in shape”. This became a formed opinion in the fourth gallery where there were spoons and forks and knives hanging on strings over canvases to which they had no relationship and or meaning. In the fifth gallery there was “Between the Clock and the Bed”, a design the artist had seen painted on a car on the Long Island Expressway. As a large painting this was physically impressive but it did not sustain the interest of the observer, neither mine nor the others with me in the gallery. Facing it, across the room, there was one of the “Savarin” works in which this same motif was used as the ground and it immediately identified why the larger work cannot interest us: this motif works very well as a ground but not at all as a subject.

In that same gallery, facing Bed/Clock, we see, on loan from Chicago, “Near the Lagoon”, a gift of Muriel Kallis Newman (as in The Steinberg Newman Collection discussed below). And it is indeed a very impressive painting, in technique, craftsmanship, and concept. It is a definitive image: henceforth the catenary will always be associated in art with Jasper Johns. It made me aware that the allure of a suspension bridge might well reside in the sensuous drape of the cables uniting the rigidly horizontal and vertical supports. This work is vertical. Next to it, on the side wall, in a horizontal format, is “Study for a Painting”, another catenary variation that is every bit as good as the first. But on the other side wall is a third variation, with a band of harlequin diamonds that immediately recalled Cezanne and Picasso. Going to read the museum interpretation, it told me that indeed that reference was intended. Suddenly it seemed a very obvious and a very trite reference, an indication, perhaps, of over reaching.

In the last gallery there are works that are based on the pattern of a flagstone walk. I thought they looked like value studies for an Armstrong Linoleum floor covering under consideration for manufacture. Cezanne was able to find a variety of motifs in every setting: Ansel Adams traveled in a station wagon equipped so that he could stop at any place and make an artwork from what he termed a found photograph. Jasper Johns apparently has an eye for the found pattern. Fine. But these flagstone works made me aware that not every found pattern is able to sustain the observer’s interest.

Following the artist’s suggestion to study his technique I found that those works which incorporated small areas of color were far more satisfying than those which relied on gray alone. For example; “Two” has both color and interest while the smaller “0 to 9” is muddy and looks like a class room gray scale exercise. “Jubilee” is interesting because there was real risk taking with a values range that extended from 9 to 1 on the gray scale, but in most of the other works, including “Catenary”, the range was from only 5 to 3. In addition there seemed little development of the technique over the forty year period: “Tennyson”, 1958, has an almost identical ground as “Catenary”, 2002. Like Seurat’s conte drawings, (see Seurat below), this comes off as devotion to technique rather than exploration, fresh insight, or as an expression of profound interest.

I suppose it is a legitimate departure for an artist to direct our attention to his technique, in contrast to the usual method in which the effect of the work is only sometimes explained as having anything to do with the technique employed. In many of the great classic paintings technique is rarely taken into consideration, rather the anecdotal content forms the basis of the art commentary. I believe it was not until Roger Fry’s small book on Cezanne that technique ever came into consideration at all. And as for technique and its development over a span of many years, Cezanne is one of the great exemplars of genius extending his range into unknown areas through a constant and ongoing analysis of the plastic elements. Understanding his technique is a path to comprehending his profound interest, his expressive form, and his vital content. Jasper Johns’ technique is rather masturbatory in that it holds the attention of the artist, the doer, but, because there is so little involvement for us, it begins to appear as a rather tedious self involved artist’s exercise.

Finally, it seems to me that the mottled gray works beautifully in the lithographs and drawings but not as well in the paintings. In the former there is the sense of a drama on the flat surface, a sense of implied surface and depth; there are spontaneous accidents that work with the whole. In the latter there is only the sense of the gray being a methodically placed waxy, textured ground. One of the great pleasures for me in looking at paintings is that I am in intimacy with the sensual richness of the impasto. There is no sense of that in the encaustic medium.

What I did notice and to which I have a very favorable response, is that Jasper Johns’ draftsmanship is excellent. It makes me aware of a sadness I feel for modern artists, de Kooning, Larry Rivers, et al, who draw with great mastery but who cannot use their gifts, or can only use them sparingly, because of the dictates of modern art and that to do so would place their status, as true moderns, in jeopardy. It is as if, as makers of modern art, they have become prisoners of their own self description. To which I can only state: Create dangerously!

Despite Jasper Johns’ invitation that we see only the intellectual side of his work, there is another element that is very apparent in this exhibition: there is a very strong homosexual presence in these works. In one we see a hairy scrotum with an upright penis cut off by the edge of the format (ouch). In a painting featuring a frontal male nude the penis is uncircumcised. One painting references Frank O’Hara, another Hart Crane, the celebrated suicide and darling of the educated gay masses. Remembering how the gay culture of the 60’s relied on code in the correspondence among the initiates, I began to wonder if there were more coded and hidden messages in other of the works here or if the artist, having lived in that coded era, was unaware of the degree to which he has used that device. It is interesting because it seems so contrary to the parameters he established for the observers: despite his claim that there is no message, there is, however, a strong subtext.

I think Jasper Johns is authentic, I think he has talent, and I think he is the master of his craft. But I sense that he has spent his working days illustrating an art world polemic. He has spent forty years making not very interesting works, works that show a decided lack of personal growth. That seems to be a common feature among American artists…Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko, Calder, Dale Chihuly… I often wonder, having created a personal, signature, image, if these men haven’t opened a production facility to simply make product for the American art market and the many, many museums. This is a nation of cultural conformity: it is a shame that our artists cannot break free from the ties in which they have bound themselves.

And one last humorous observation. Merce Cunningham is almost always referred to in print as “the dancer choreographer”. John Cage is referred to as “the contemporary composer who often worked with Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. It seems to me that in just about everything I have read about Jasper Johns it is mentioned that in his early New York days, back in the 50’s and 60’s, “he formed a friendship with John Cage, the contemporary composer, and Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. Something could be made of this name tagged hierarchy, but perhaps you get the point.

Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

This collection has been described as being unique in that it is the only extant collection put together during the lifetime of the artists. Most of these works are American and were collected in New York City between 1950 and 1954 although there are other modern, European, works from other dates. I am uncertain if the entire collection was on view.

Lately I have become very interested in studying collections: I am curious to discern the common thread running through a body of collected works and to see if I can ascertain what the collector’s interests might be beyond the school or style. These works are mid century abstract expressionist works. That is the main theme. As a secondary theme many of the paintings were black and white with some small touches of color…or none. Where color was dominant the hues had a lowered chromaticity so that overall there was a mellow tone to the collection. The exceptions to this were in the works by Hans Hoffman and Alexander Calder. In Calder’s work the three primaries were softened by the addition of areas in black and white. In Hoffman’s work the green hue of two squares was softened by the red hue of the ground.

There were two main influences: those artists following Arshile Gorky began with a reference to the human figure and those following Hans Hoffman referenced “nature”, meaning, I believe, landscape.

One of the most interesting common threads, but not a factor in selecting the works, is that many of these paintings are works made before that particular artist created his familiar iconic image that is seen in almost every museum today. For example the Clyfford Still is a black on white ragged edged movement, but not the common black vertical tear with some additional bright color. While that later development can be seen everywhere to the point of having become common, this is by far the most interesting work of his that I have yet seen.

There is a de Kooning sketch from early in the Woman series, dedicated to the collectors, but the oil on canvas is of black lines of what appears to be several figures drawn one over the others. Where the forms remained open they were closed with additional, gratuitous, lines. This created an allover pattern and the areas defined by the crossing lines were then filled in as flat independent forms. White and a muddied white are predominant with slight touches of color here and there. As a result there is a sense of there being “something” here, but rather than seeing it clearly it has become a field of confusion: what do I see; what is here? I was reminded of Frost’s poem, The Watchers: “they cannot look out far; they cannot look in deep…” Too many museums ride the de Kooning bandwagon by exhibiting only his work from the Woman series. It was a great delight to find this really wonderful painting in this collection.

For all the look of modernism about these works, there is in the whole collection a very strong sense of classical repose. But the most interesting characteristic is that it reads as a personal collection representing personal interests within a specific time frame rather than being a group of works displayed in a museum in order to illustrate a particular school, an historic era, or an art world polemic.

The works by Murray Louis and Kenneth Nolan are stained raw canvas and here they are credited with having begun that tradition although in other reading I had understood that Helen Frankenthaler was the first to do this. Her work here has some staining in the early stages of the development but she then continued with a heavier impasto. She has used a long thin rectangular format and has made it even thinner by painting a wide black area on one side. Two distorted large circles almost appear to be mirror images of one another and these circles are repeated in smaller sizes. There is a wonderful and powerful sense of action, surface and depth. The painting is very dynamic, much more so than others of her works which I often find too cloying with their watercolor-like, ephemeral prettiness. This had not only a motif of circles, but, over all, it had real balls.

Facing the de Kooning across the room was a Phillip Guston work, an abstraction which had the structure of a cubist painting, in which all of the elements rushed to and built up a complexity in the center of the format, leaving the surrounding sides less developed. This was very pale and seemed almost an out of focus flower garden, saved from complete prettiness by some dirty beige scrumbling. I’m not a Guston fan, especially of the late works, and if I had to choose something of his for myself it would be from this period.

The Hans Hoffman, essentially two green squares on a red ground, has a very strong sense of surface. The greens do not leap out as might be expected, but rather seem calmed and almost subsumed by the red. They rest and seem very slightly to hover. Near and far are suggested. Despite Hoffman’s usual six colors, three primaries and three secondaries, these do not seem to be “rich” colors. But neither are they juicy and so overall there is a rather Spartan sense of “making do” with this limited palette. There is less the sense of exploiting the richness of color than there is of an artist at work in his studio using color as a tool.

Hoffman is very good and I enjoy his work, observing how he creates a sense of balance through variation of the elements within what is usually a standard format, how he creates a sense of forms by altering the direction of the brush strokes, but I think, despite his adherence to color, generally minus white and black, that he is not a colorist, he seems far more interested in form and in using color to suggest form. And despite his influence, I think that he is not “major”. Hoffman’s work lacks depth: what you see is what you get. The work of one of his students next to his had a beautiful sense of color used to define the work. It was beautiful and juicy color. It was every bit as good as Hoffman’s if not a more satisfying visual experience.

On the other side of the Hoffman was a small work painted by Richard Artschwagle, “Bread”. On pressed wood the heavy surface texture was given a black over white finish with a shaded oval in the center indicating a loaf of the title. Eschewing the grandiose values of abstract expressionism, this small jewel holds its own amongst the larger works with accomplishment, talent, and wit.

In the smaller room outside, a Larry Rivers work, a portrait of his mother in law, was done in the large format. The figure, a line drawing, is seen reposing in a stuffed overlarge arm chair. It is excellently drawn but the areas indicated then became suggestions for the development of the color, as if the line and the color had been maintained as two separate elements. (Contrary to the Cezanne dictum: The color is the drawing.) Worked up primarily in a dusty rose and a pale olive green, with some orange flesh tones, the motif is there but the painting has its own presence and authority. It is a very, very nice painting. It is very human and very respectful. I have always liked Larry River’s work and I am always so sorry that he is not more highly regarded than his frequent omission in American museums seems to imply. If status were based on talent alone he would have his due.

Of the paintings I would think that the Robert Motherwell, Ode to the Spanish Republic, is the star turn. The black and the white are both very clean and very forthrightly stated, with the black appearing to have been dramatically imposed over the white ground. Although nothing but shape, the black is very visceral and evokes the sense of the genitalia of a Picassian bull, Spain. The ochre just to the side of the lower center edge is exactly the right color and the right amount of it. And, yes, this is the well known Motherwell iconic image. But the fact that it still provokes a powerful response, indicates, I believe, its validity and authenticity. The same cannot be said for the Marin watercolor, the Rothko color field painting nearby, or the rather too pretty Jackson Pollock Lavender drip painting.

There were some pieces of sculpture in this collection as well; most of it set at the quadrants within the room. Without exception they were welded metal, looking heavy, overwrought, and rather hostile. But then I don’t like sculpture. Neither, apparently, did the other visitors: almost everyone discovered these just before bumping into them. They leapt back and then walked around them without giving them further attention.

While this is a very good collection it would be difficult to determine that it is a great collection. This genre is widely represented in American museums where the works are presented one by each of the artists displayed. This collection too has one by each artist, unless there were others that were not shown here. For the most part the collectors have avoided what I think can be considered the clichéd utterances. All of the “right” names are included and many of the lesser known names have created works that stand as equals to those of the stars. It is a handsome group of paintings and shows a consistency of taste and discrimination. If I have any reservations it is that this represents a very brief moment in art history; it has depth in numbers but lacks breadth in the long term overview.

Another work in the smaller room was a really fine collage made of paper and fabric by a woman artist who, it was stated, had name recognition and fame during the time these works were collected but who, with the lessening dominance of abstract expressionism, faded from public awareness. I consider abstract expressionism as but one of many twentieth century ism and I am certain that even many of the well known names will someday take their place in the store rooms of the art world as well. Except for the Larry Rivers work I did not see anything in this collection that I thought would occasion a reappraisal of the movement as it is presently defined.

Wanting to know more, to answer the questions this exhibition raised, outside the gallery, at one of the Met’s ubiquitous sales kiosks, I considered buying the catalogue but in thumbing through it I was very surprised to see that the color of the reproductions was extremely garish and hardly representative of the beautiful colors in this collection. Therefore, at $50.00, I passed on it, despite the vigorous protestations of the salesclerk. But then, that is her job: to sell the books.