KAREN WILKIN
At the
Galleries
The most discussed exhibition of 1996 has been the uptown Guggen–
heim's
Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.
Not that the show was controversial. Everyone deplored its peculiar in–
clusions, strange weighting, and conspicuous omissions; the only
arguments were about which artists had been slighted and which overem–
phasized. The curator and author of the exhibition's catalogue, Mark
Rosenthal, promised a definitive, comprehensive overview of the course
of abstraction from Kandinsky to the present; what he provided was an
intellectually dishonest, blatant distortion of the historical record. For ex–
ample, you'd never have known from Rosenthal's show that there was
any Matisse-inspired, color-based postwar abstraction in the United States
other than Ellsworth Kelly's, nor guessed at the number of thoughtful
painters and sculptors, many with substantial reputations, who are making
inventive, probing abstract art today.
Granted, a truly inclusive survey of abstraction is probably impossible
to realize as an exhibition: in fact, Rosenthal's catalogue is more compre–
hensive and better balanced than his show, although it is faintly
apologetic, organized strangely, and lacks an index. Granted, too, Frank
Lloyd Wright's building, even with the Gwathmey-Siegel additions, is
the least accommodating place imaginable for such an exhibition. (Why
didn't
Abstraction in the Twentieth Century
spread to the Soho Guggen–
heim's elegant Isozaki-designed galleries, whose refined, flexible spaces
are ideal for large paintings and sculptures?) If Rosenthal had declared:
"Here are what I believe to be the half-dozen most significant approaches
to abstraction, as exemplified by these half-dozen artists," you'd simply
have agreed or disagreed. But as presented,
Abstraction in the Twentieth
Century
raised expectations of thoroughness, scholarly probity, and broad
vision that it utterly failed to meet. The selections ranged from the first–
rate to the inadequate to the bewildering. Some artists were represented
in depth, while others were reduced to a single "signature" piece. A series
of Agnes Martin's works were installed in tranquil isolation, while a lone
Brancusi was plunked on the ramp like an afterthought. (A solitary Dan
Flavin, shoved into one of the spiral's bays, looked sadly like a fixture in a
lighting store display.) There were inexplicable omissions: Paul Klee,
Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Robert Motherwell, Moms
