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PARTISAN REVIEW
"wheatsheaf" An atypically solid piece, a slatted shell rearing itself up on
end, may point to a new direction. Levy is assured, daring, and often very
good. He gets into trouble when his work looks too preconceived, or
when he seems to have simply accepted the givens of a particular mate–
rial, but he's willing to take risks and test the limits of his ideas. He's
someone to watch.
A final note. The much-vaunted, much-discussed "High-Low" show
at the Museum of Modern Art, "Modern Art and Popular Culture," the
debut of MOMA's new Director of the Department of Painting and
Sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe, has managed to enrage just about everyone,
cutting across ideological, aesthetic, and political differences. I suppose
this is an accomplishment. Since Varnedoe-bashing has become a local
sport, I will say only that it's a show that misses its own point; the way
modernism embraced all kinds of things, popular culture inc1uded, that
high art traditionally refused to acknowledge is a provocative theme and
a much larger and more interesting one than the narrow, over- literal
view afforded us by "High-Low."
On the other hand, the Brooklyn Museum's October through De–
cember exhibition of Milton Avery's drawings, organized by Linda
Kohnheim Kramer, was a model of what museum shows should be. The
sensitively chosen works, spanning virtually all of Avery's mature career,
made his extraordinary range and inventiveness as a draughtsman obvious.
It was all the more enlightening because we tend to think of Avery pri–
marily as a colorist. It was c1ear from this show, however, that like his
mentor Matisse (with whom he hated to be compared), Avery was a
master of line, of tone, of black and white oppositions. There was a
handsome catalogue, too, with good illustrations and an intelligent essay.
All in ali, a delight.
