KAREN WILKIN
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Rowell, is at times dazzling, at times irritating, at times downright perverse.
The first work on view is the Metropolitan's sublime Cezanne,
Still Life
with Eggplants,
with its ginger pot, its tipped plate of fruit, its rucked cloth,
and its strangely small straw-bound wine bottle, and from there until the
mid-point, the exhibition is a curator's wish-list of superb, often recher–
che examples of still life, broadly interpreted, in the twentieth century. The
Matisses alone, a spectacular selection from MOMA's own holdings and
many other private and public collections, are worth the trip, and the
Picassos and Mir6s don't lag far behind. There are wonderful surprises, such
as a little 1912 Derain of rock-solid pears and bananas, clearly indebted to
Picasso, but a terrific picture nonetheless, and a pair of tough, juicy Max
Beckmanns, including one with tipped candlesticks that is positively mon–
umental. There are exhilarating comparisons, such as the stellar grouping
of Picasso's sheet metal
Guitar,
1912-13, his polychrome
Absinthe Glass,
1914, and that celebrated construction, now in the Tate Gallery,
Still Life
with Ball Fringe,
1914-the holy grails of modernist sculpture in a single
display case!
There are also incomprehensible omissions. How is it possible, for
example, to mount an exhibition dealing with the modern still life with
only one Giorgio Morandi-a less than wonderful Metaphysical painting,
at that? (Apart from the fact that the picture is not a first-rate example of
what Morandi was capable of, at any time, his flirtation with Metaphysical
painting lasted only a couple of years in a career that spanned nearly half a
century.) Why were late Braque and Klee slighted and late Guston given
such short shrift? Why was Stuart Davis represented only by a single paint–
ing from the 1920s and none of his razzle-dazzle mature "unstilllifes"?
How could anyone ignore David Smith's astonishing
workbenchgueridons?
And so on. Yet, puzzling as these exclusions may be, the generally high level
of much of the first half of the show and the intelligence of many of the
comparisons make up for a lot. The second part of the exhibition, however,
is another matter.
Here many of the inclusions (and omissions) are truly inexplicable.
Admittedly, it's confusing territory. The boundaries between depicting
objects and using them as points of departure for formal explorations,
between using real objects literally and incorporating fragments of actual–
ity to refer to something else have eroded completely in the past twenty–
five or thirty years. But a great many of the works in the second half of the
show seem to be there simply to ensure the presence of a currently fash–
ionable name. (That's the kindest thing to be said about a lumpen
Baselitz.) Not that the first part of the show is exempt from this sort of
thing; witness a banal Frida Kahlo of prickly pears. There are exceptions
-less sought-after artists whose work offers serious or playful comments
