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ARTISAN REVIEW
enough is.
If you subscribe to this new orthodoxy, the high point of the past sea–
son was the Whitney Biennial. Of course, if that was your paradigm you
would have missed what were to my eye some far more interesting, albeit
less modish exhibitions, shows focusing on intellectually and visually
challenging art that nonetheless refused to translate easily into words. My
vote for most provocative exhibit of the spring goes to
Picasso and the
Age
if
Iron
at the Guggenheim Museum from March through June. This as–
sembly of work by Pablo Picasso, Julio Gonzalez, Alberto Giacometti,
Alexander Calder, and David Smith had an odd thesis, strange inclusions,
stranger omissions, curious catalogue essays, and a problematic installation,
but it was so chock-a-block with splendid sculpture that the rest didn't
matter very much. Marvelous pieces studded the ramp of the
Guggenheim: from Picasso, the playful head made of colanders and sev–
eral versions of the angular, linear monument to Apollinaire; from
Gonzalez, mysterious, evocative constructed heads and figures; from
Giacometti, sininster "caged" bronzes and a delicately poised charioteer;
from Calder, brilliant early works, a fragile improvisation on circus
tightrope walkers, and some demented towers. But it was the Smiths that
were most spectacular: obsessive, brooding structures from the 1930s and
1940s, fierce "personages" of the 1950s, and a cranky, elongated
Wagon
from 1962. (The show concentrated on the late 1920s to the early 1950s,
with one late work from each artist for context.)
It was a treat to see the individual pieces in the show and often illu–
minating to see them together. Moving from Gonzalez's spiny
Cactus Man
(1939), to Smith's equally bristly, but more expedient
Aggressive Character
(1947), told you much about each artist, as did seeing Giacometti's
Woman with Her Throat Cut
(1932), sprawled on the floor of the rotunda,
followed by Smith's response,
Suspended Figure
(1935) on the ramp. Their
differences and similarities - the Giacometti suave and elegant for all its
brutality, the Smith ramshackle and loose-limbed for all its dependency
on Giacometti's insect-like conception of the body - summed up much
of the relationship of American and European modernism in those years.
Similarly, the excellent selection of Picasso's paintings and drawings made
evident the wide-rangingness of his influence, while the exuberant large–
scale
Woman in a Garden
(1929-30), and small, intense constructed heads
of the late 1920s and early 1930s bore witness to the effect of his intimate
collaboration with his compatriot, Gonzalez.
Yet irritants abounded. The show raised expectations that cross-fertil–
ization and influences would be revealed by the juxtaposition of key
works, but there were conspicuous gaps. Smith's first constructed metal
sculptures (quite likely the first made in the United States) included three
