What small galleries can do

The foxes vs. the dinosaurs:
What small galleries can do that large museums can't

ROBERT ZALLER

The announcement of Philippe de Montebello’s forthcoming retirement as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has brought a predictable cascade of tributes. Certainly the Met has grown under his tenure, completing the transformation begun under Thomas Hoving from the gray grandmother of Fifth Avenue to its chic and trendy dowager, the very model of the modern museum as culture mall to the world.

This is not to scant the real accomplishments of Montebello’s tenure. The Met is in healthier condition than when he took it over in 1977, as is New York. But two recent events point up, in different ways, its abiding problems.

One is the repatriation of the Euphronios Krater, the ancient Greek masterpiece now acknowledged to have been pillaged. The Met made a great deal of its acquisition; its return is a corresponding embarrassment. It is also a reminder that much of what the public is invited to admire on museum walls is loot. But that, of course, is hardly an issue for the Met alone.

Almost everything else wrong with the modern Met, however, was on display in the recent display of its collection of Dutch paintings. The Met simply put up every Dutch painting it owned, divided (since no other principle of exhibition was involved) by major bequests. A more perfect combination of braggadocio and intellectual laziness could hardly be imagined. The Met is charmless— however gussied up— because it is so large; to put size itself on display is simply to advertise ostentation and vulgarity. Rembrandts and Vermeers are not meant to be shown off the rack.

Vitality of the abstract impulse

Just a few blocks away, however, one could see what genuine curatorial enterprise can produce. At L&M Arts, a show of latter-day abstraction, “The Complexity of the Simple,” pulls together 20 artists, working in various media over a 50-year period, to show the continuing vitality of the abstract impulse. Over two floors and five rooms, joined by L&M’s elegantly winding staircase, an ensemble of works played off against each other, showing not only complexity in the apparently simple— most of the pieces were severely geometric— but also similarity, indeed overarching unity, in difference.

Consider, for example, Ellsworth Kelly’s wall sculpture, White Black (1988), which is paired with a late, untitled Rothko painting of 1968. The Kelly consists of two shapes, one square and one rectangular, hung at an oblique angle to yield the effect of asymmetrical diamonds while casting a complex of interlocking shadow on the white wall below. The Rothko is a particularly fine example of his characteristic block shapes, this time a smudged black pair with violet fringes against a sand-colored background. Here are two works of radically different sensibility though expressing a common tradition, each commenting on and enhancing the other while both retain their individuality and distinction.

That is the kind of relationship a discerning curatorial eye can reveal, and it’s replicated throughout the show: with Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square and Sol LeWitt’s 1-2-3-2-1, for example; or (though separated by different rooms), Yves Klein’s vaguely imagistic F I (1961) with Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Black and Blue Butterfly) of 2005; and John Chamberlain’s characteristic assemblage of compressed auto parts, Big E (1962), with a delicate but crinkly collage by Anselm Reyle (2006). In each case, something is created that is more than the sum of its juxtaposed parts: in short, a true exhibition.

A complex world of ensembles

A similar effect was achieved in Jan Krugier’s splendidly curated “Drawing in Space” at the Richard L. Feigen Gallery. This show’s inspiration lay in the remark of the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942) that his purpose was to “draw in space”— that is, not to occupy space but to explore and divine it. Gonzalez was a presiding presence in this show, of course, along with (mostly) Mediterranean contemporaries, including Picasso, Braque (a wonderful 1918 collage), Miro, Giacometti and the remarkable Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia, arguably the one South American artist on a par with the continent’s great poets and novelists.

Using disparate materials— drawings, sketches, sculptures, and constructions— Krugier created a complex whole in ensembles of two and three (Gonzalez’s Seated Woman angled against Ellsworth Kelly’s Study for Curves; Torres-Garcia’s Estructura con Forma T beside Anthony Caro’s shield-like Barcelona View; a sprightly Calder between two tense Giacometti women; the furious energy of Picasso’s Figurine (1931) between two sheets from the Dinard sketchbook), with larger wall units and a central room space anchored by Germaine Richier’s Ernst-like Chessboard (1956). The quality of the individual works was uniformly high, and some of them (Matisse’s charcoal Dancer of 1949, and a sculpture design from one of Henry Moore’s later sketchbooks) were as good as it gets. Strategically placed splashes of color from Jean Tinguely and Robert Rauschenberg (a splendid red collage, Turkey) gave body to the whole.

Neither the L&M nor the Feigen shows had anything beyond a few brief printed remarks and a couple of artists’ statements to point out their objectives. They needed none. They spoke, simply and beautifully, for themselves.

An aerosol spray artist

Two other uptown Manhattan shows, both just opened, may be noted in passing. “David Smith: Sprays,” at the Gagosian Gallery— curated by the artist’s daughter Candida and by Peter Stevens, director of the Smith estate— is the first New York exhibit of Smith’s aerosol spray paintings and drawings in more than 30 years.

Smith was drawn to commercial aerosol paint almost immediately after its introduction in the mid-1950s, and used it on both canvas and paper to produce dozens of elegant works, some as sketches for sculpture projects but the majority as independent works of art. Those that relate to the sculptures exude a freedom, lightness and intricacy that the finished works, in their denser medium, at least partially forgo. The others explore floating, coral-like shapes that resist the materiality of sculpture or suggest disassembled Chinese characters. Like Warhol’s silk-screens, they testify to the rapid assimilation of technology and art— or, perhaps, as the Greek concept of techné suggests, to their essential indivisibility.

Unity that Aristotle cherished

“Richard Pousette-Dart: Drawing Form is a Verb,” at the Knoedler Gallery, is the latest in a series of exhibitions (“The Living Edge,” in Frankfurt; “Transparent Reflections,” in Los Angeles) that have established Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) as a major American graphic artist. Coming on the heels of the general retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim last fall, it reinforces the growing sense of his importance as an American original.

Pousette-Dart’s art is, indeed, transactional: an attempted realization of the infused, organic unity of spirit and matter that Aristotle saw as the foundation of being. In practice, this results in luminous, densely textured works in which the material world, reduced to its prime geometries and sorted into arabesques and puzzles, acquires a primal freshness and glow.

As modern science has lost its Aristotelian convictions, the artist himself (as Pousette-Dart suggests) has become a crucial link between spirit and matter, and hence a factor in the “re-enchantment” of the world. However one may take this construction of the artist’s task— Kandinsky held a not dissimilar view— the result, in Pousette-Dart’s case, is strangely compelling, and the works in this show, many dating from late in his career, display an art that continued to evolve fruitfully to the end.



To read a response, click here.
For another viewpoint on Philippe de Montebello by Victoria Skelly, click here.