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PARTISAN REVIEW
Louis, and Richard Diebenkorn - to name only a few - not to mention a
host of serious, gifted younger practitioners. Why was Yves Klein ac–
corded a miniature solo show, apparently at the expense of most of his
European contemporaries? Why include a mediocre picture by Marsden
Hartley, a marvelous painter, but one who produced only a handful of
quasi-abstractions, and exclude Arthur Dove, who spent a lifetime ex–
ploring the possibilities of non-representation, beginning at just about the
same time as Kandinsky? Space limitations at the Guggenheim can't be
the answer, since Rosenthal found room for two enonnous, virtually
identical pictures by Gerhardt Richter, an artist who clearly regards ab–
straction not as an intellectual imperative but as a phenomenon among
phenomena; the
appearance
of abstract painting serves Richter as a con–
ceptual base, interchangeable with the newspaper photos and paint color
charts that were his sources some years back.
Sculptors fared no better. Rosenthal purported to seriously address
issues of abstraction in twentieth-century sculpture with only two David
Smiths - one less than compelling - and without a single work by
An–
thony Caro. Yet there were three pieces by Martin Puryear, an inventive
artist but hardly one who, as Smith and Caro did, radically changed our
assumptions of what sculpture might be.
If
Puryear's embrace of alterna–
tive materials and his non-constructivist vocabulary were the issue, why
were there no sculptures by Richard Deacon? Yet for artists in every me–
dium, inclusion, even inclusion of multiple works, was no guarantee of
accurate representation. Only one of De Kooning's superb black and
white abstractions of the 1940s was on view, amid a group of his repeti–
tive, undistinguished paintings from the late fifties through the seventies.
The show had an unpleasant subtext of hostility to artists associated
with Clement Greenberg. Most were noticeably absent: Hofmann and
Louis - as I mentioned earlier - Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, Jules
Olitski, Larry Poons. Jackson Pollock, represented by a group of spec–
tacular pictures, was a conspicuous exception, with a single, splendid but
awkwardly installed Helen Frankenthaler painting from the 1950s pre–
sented as a sort of sequel to Pollock: that Frankenthaler has been painting
steadily and often brilliantly for the past forty years did not figure in
Rosenthal's account.
Rosenthal is not the only curator to assign mature living artists to the
past, nor is he alone in judging them solely by the works that first estab–
lished their reputations and ignoring
all
subsequent efforts, no matter how
potent or exploratory. But his total exclusion of the majority of
Frankenthaler's colleagues suggests other than aesthetic motives.
In
con–
trast to those obvious gaps, the selection of Frank Stella's works spanned
his entire career, from brooding early stripe paintings to a vast, self-
