154
PARTISAN REVIEW
its millennium super-show,
The American Century,
covering
1950
to the
present. Many other important artists were omitted from the exhibition,
but Avery is even missing from the catalogue index.
The excellence of Avery's work speaks for itself. All that needs to be
said about Part Two is that it is just as skewed and inaccurate as Part
One, but in slightly different ways. Once again, Abstract Expressionism
was slighted and most of the artists associated with Clement Greenberg
ignored or "marginalized." Space wasn't the issue; there was room for
a section devoted to pattern painting. Even more than Part One, how–
ever, Part Two managed to reduce virtually everything in it, good, bad,
or mediocre, to the status of illustration of cultural theory.
It
was
depressingly clear that for the curators of Part Two, there was no differ–
ence between the splendid David Smith sculptures at the beginning of
the show and the clip from
The Simpsons,
endlessly repeated on a video
monitor, at its end.
But there were unexpected pleasures last season to offset the pre–
dictable irritants of the Whitney-for one, Cornelia Foss's show of
modest, wind-swept seaside landscapes at DFN Gallery. Foss has an
acute eye for the brilliant light of the water's edge, and in her best, usu–
ally most simply structured pictures, broad expanses of saturated blues,
tans, and greens evoke sea, sand, and grasses with great economy and
effect. You can almost smell the salt air. The star of the show, however,
was a full-length portrait of a man in a blue shirt, accompanied by an
energetic terrier, outdoors, bathed in seaside light. Maybe Foss should
spend next summer painting figures?
John Clement's agreeable steel construction at Tricia Collins was
another surprise. A pair of not-quite-symmetrical flaring arcs of tubing,
joined by an open eat's cradle of rectangular sections, zigzagged across
the gallery, all but filling the space and making viewers pick their way
around and over the sculpture. ] liked Clement's sensitivity to the visual
weight and proportions of his elements, the generosity of scale, and the
ambition of the piece. I hope there will be an opportunity to see more
of what he's doing.
