An Art Apology

[New York Peasant by Wilfrid:  June 14, 2011]

Anyone would think I don't look at pictures any more.  In fact, I have managed to miss some promising exhibits recently, and some I've seen I haven't had time to write about.

In the first category, Picasso's guitars at MoMA.  In the second, the great upheaval.

I was in MoMA to see something else (what?) after the guitar show started.  I looked in and rapidly concluded that viewing the show would take an hour or more.  Sure, you can walk around and mutter, "another guitar, another guitar..."; but it's a waste of time really.  To get the juice out of this kind of focused exhibition, you need to be prepared and clear-headed enough to look hard and think hard.  Picasso repeatedly painted or built "guitars" because the object helped him to understand radical ways of dealing with volume in two-dimensional space.

Wow, maybe I didn't need to see it after all.

No, I remain wedded to the idea that appreciating art requires some concentration.  Our galleries may be full these days, but they're full of people who look at the name of the picture, glance at it, then move on (you've seen them), or people whose main sensory input before works of art comes from the headphones they're wearing.  It's all so wrong.  So I puritanically filed the Picasso show under "see later when you have enough time" and then never got around to it.

I did subject myself to another compendium blockbuster at the Gugg, "The Great Upheaval".  These shows are not my style - see my review of the classicism fest back in January.  With this show, ostensibly about early twentieth century revolutions in art, the Gugg reminded me yet again of the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.  That vast repository is often said to have at least one mediocre work by every great artist.  These big Gugg shows, when based on the museum's own collection, don't have a rich fund of masterpieces to draw on.

Sure, Kandinsky they have.  But then it's this and that old friend and some decidedly second rank artists.  Among the familiar sights, Malevich's old biddies in the snow, Boccioni's man running for a bus.  You know.

So the modernist upheaval?  Well there's cubism, expressionism, futurism, abstraction, all dutifully represented.  A token Schiele, a token Kokoschka.  Way to many maudlin doses of sentiment from Marc and Chagall.  What was good?  Well, an early nature morte by Mondrian, believe it or not.  "Still Life with Gingerpots" - reminded me of early Stuart Davis.

Best in show, for me, a series of drawings and canvases by Delaunay with the Eiffel Tower as subject.  It breaks and clashes in the sky, overwhelming in its size and brash modernity.  It's at war with the Paris skyline.  These are grand pictures.

And the show ended on a suitably melancholic note under shadows of war - Kirchner's infinitely compassionate portrait of artillerymen showering.  Nude and vulnerable, kids on the brink of  battle.

Yes, the show is closed; I am a lazy ass, but there are several links to content here.

Comments

[Lippy]

Wilf, you still have until August 7 to catch the Alexander McQueen fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Believe me, you don't want to miss it.