I have nothing negative to say. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest modern and contemporary installation, “Epic Abstraction,” is beautiful. It is exhilarating to see so many artworks of this sweeping scope up close, but at the same time the show has an intimate, comforting quality. The artworks are like very large friends.
The show opens, naturally, with Abstract Expressionism. A few Pollocks are next to a Kazuo Shiraga which is intriguing because normally Gutai, the movement Shiraga helped pioneer, as a performance-based movement, as man wrestling with mud, and here you see the result of some of these battles, surprisingly beautiful abstraction. The wall text describes Untitled from 1958 it as being full of “meaty lavenders,” which is just a great concept. I have never thought of lavender as meat-related, but if such a thing could be true, it’s true here. This also shows us how influential Ab Ex was — apparently Shiraga saw Pollock’s art in Tokyo in 1951, 2 years after the famous Life magazine article about him possibly being the greatest living artist. This is the first moment where everyone is looking at American modern art instead of America looking at Europe or elsewhere.
Epic is a great word for Pollock because his works do have a sprawling quality, and this is why, in the name of his machismo, they have been compared to the flat lands he grew up near in Wyoming. To me his work is the high pictorial equivalent of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” — though these are different mediums made for incredibly different audiences, they display a similar rugged masculine individualism and, oddly enough, both have an existential quality, showing viewers the courage of their convictions, their desire to live authentically.
Pollock probably would not have accepted this, or what I’m about to say next, since AbEx artists typically wanted to focus on the handmade rather than the industrial, but the works have a cinematic quality since they are so vast. When you get to be up close with a Pollock, the drips are like different narrative threads, speaking a nonverbal language, but speaking nonetheless, and you can follow different “passages.” They are like film stills that tell stories on their own but are needed for the larger whole, or dense paragraphs of a novel, where you can pull them out for your own interest, but they exist in a larger context.
The show also has a room of Rothkos, tragically sublime as always, even the brighter ones, but rightly includes some 1950s abstraction beyond “the big three” of Pollock, Rothko, and Newman (though I think the latter is a bit under-represented). The choices are not surprising — MoMA’s AbEx New York show from a few years ago showed many more members of that scene — but they’re welcome. There are two paintings by Clyfford Still, Untitled (1960) and 1950 E (1950). All of the New York School artists developed a signature style that defined the appearance of their mature work. Still is known for forms that are both splotch-like and jagged with a variety of bold colors. His paintings look like frightening interior design samples or carpets that animals have slashed. This may sound insulting, but I think they’re great. They are decorative (even if such a description would have bothered the artist), dramatic and violent. The forms look both colored in and ripped out, pretty, garish, and violent all at once.
There is also a thick, grimy, built-up painting, Conflict (1956-57) by Ab Ex friend and influencer Alfonso Ossorio, that looks like the flattened carcass of a black beetle with a red dot i nteh center, a putrid off white background, and some yellow and brown tones. The visceral harshness of the paint is even beyond Pollock’s treatment, which has a lighter elegance. In the next room is a painting by one of the few women who was acknowledged as part of the New York School in the 1950s, Hedda Sterne, with New York #2 from 1953, which uses sweeping lines, rectangular forms, and a black, white, and rusty brown palette to evoke the workings of the city. Pieces like those by Still, Ossorio and Sterne insist that viewers contemplate Abstract Expressionism, and Ab Ex more generally, beyond drips, zips, and color blocks.
One of the exhibit’s valuable qualities is that it does not forget sculpture. Painting dominates most rooms, as one would expect, but there is meaningful “epic abstract” sculpture, too, with a Hepworth, a David Smith, a Noguchi, a Truitt, and in the last room a large, black and exciting late Louise Nevelson piece. The Nevelson is Mrs. N’s Palace (1964-77) is characteristically black, a box with forms on the inside and outside that look as if they could be used for something or help put together an object but don’t fuly cohere in that way. There are orderly rows of horizontal lines, diagonal shelves, gears and even plungers. It looks like a cabinet of curiosities one could walk in to, but there is a rope that prevents visitors from doing so. What a drag!
There is a large amount of that American follower of AbEx called Post-Painterly Abstraction. There is a Helen Frankenthaler Western Dream (1957), two Kenneth Nolands, a Morris Louis striped painting, Pungent Distances (1961), a surprisingly emotionless Barnett Newman with two zips, and a large blue Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Panel II (1977). I’ve never known what to make of this movement. It’s purely formal (only about qualities like line, color, shape), and emphasizes the flatness of the canvas — a special form of acrylic paint was made for Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler is famous for her paint thinned with turpentine so it soaks into or stains the canvas instead of sitting on top of it. The Kenneth Noland paintings characteristically reflect on the material quality of the canvas by pointing to its center through a series of concentric circles. I don’t know what to make of these, except that it’s nice to see things from a textbook outside of a textbook. But they are certainly a valuable part of the exhibition because they show us what American abstraction became after Pollock, Rothko, and Newman. Fortunately we are given some more interesting 1960s interventions, like Cy Twombly’s charming graffiti and child’s doodle-like canvas, Dutch Interior (1962), based loosely on a Miro based loosely on a Vermeer, and the lesser known Wall-Hanging with Tombstone Forms (1969) by Ilona Keseru whose red, purple and light pink toothy forms are whimsical but also solemn, evoking the distinctive form of Hungarian gravestones.
But there was a much wider array of abstract experiments than one would see in a textbook. There is a Yayoi Kusama, No. B 62 (1962), that shows infinitely repeating scale-like red forms, evoking her mirror rooms. As with the Shiraga, the Met shows the abstract painting of artists known for performance, and it’s an interesting, unusual approach to these artists; it flips them on their heads. Joan Mitchell’s beautiful, three paneled lilac, gray and black speckled La Vie en Rose (1979) and Joan Snyder’s colorful elaboration on brick-like forms, hearts and splotches in Smashed Strokes Hope (1971) show innovative, under-exposed ways of moving abstraction beyond Pollock and company and beyond a dreary, mechanistic formalism.
The exhibit shows a wide variety of purposes that contemporary abstraction can have. One piece is conceptual, Jennifer Bartlett’s Squaring (1973-74), made of blocks based on square roots. Though it doesn’t look like it, the piece behaves like Renaissance art in taking basic mathematics as its fundamental principle. There are some of Bridget Riley’s illusory Op Art works from the 1970s. In the last room of the exhibit is Night Journey (1969-70) by Frank Bowling, which implies the shapes of several continents and brings up the forced exodus of slaves from their home country to a new one. Near this piece is the striking Shadows of the Field (2008) by Thornton Dial that uses pieces of cotton to reference slavery. These are important inclusions since so much earlier abstraction used the form to evoke purity and autonomy, to evade history. In the powerful one-two punch of Bowling and Dial toward the end of the show, the Met asserts that abstraction does not have to be seen as a privileged pipe dream but as a valid means of communication.
Yet the show ends on a double note, one of seriousness but also of whimsy and playfulness. I enjoyed the inclusion of a Tinguely sculpture toward the end of the show. I never thought of these as abstract since they tend to be machines you can sit on like bicycles. Bicycles have recognizable forms. But these sculptures hardly do. They’re a collection of gears, metal and detritus. Many of them actually “explode” on their own — Tinguely “performed” an exploding sculpture like this in MoMA’s garden in 1960 in a piece called “Hommage to New York.” It has a silly, Dada sensibility and expresses a complex ambivalence toward technology as a playful yet harmful force in a capitalist environment. This brings all kinds of associations and issues to the show I never imagined would be there. It’s all too easy to overlook sculpture for painting in so many areas of art history and museum shows, and while painting does dominate “epic abstraction,” its sculptural inclusions are well-chosen.
But for all of this great, big art, the exhibit never really addresses the question of “epicness.” Modernist abstraction before World War II was small, standard easel painting size. So why does it become so much larger in the 1940s? This makes sense with Abstract Expressionism where artists use the canvas to assert their humanity after war and to grapple with existential questions. The issues presented are as vast and monumental as the canvases that evoke them. But why does so much abstraction remain large? Is size necessary for a Frankenthaler or a Louis or a Kelly? To Keseru’s cemetary-inspired forms? Why does size matter and how is it connected to abstraction after Pollock and company? What does a large canvas evoke when existential concerns are not at the forefront of the artist’s mind? It seems that the Met wanted to collect large nonfigurative works and put them together instead of questioning their organizational strategy. And yet, I don’t really mind. The Met has created an intelligent, meditative, even intimate space of abstract painting and sculpture, and I think it is the kind of space where we viewers can pose such questions without having the answers.
The word “epic” also brings up an important question for abstraction — that of narrative. An epic is a story; Homer’s epic poetry comes to mind. For most, if not all of its history, abstraction, in its different avant-garde incarnations, has sought to avoid narrative, even to transcend it. Accompanying Pollock’s rise to fame was the notoriously strict formalism of critic Clement Greenberg who felt that narrative, plot, story, symbol were all literary devices that detracted from the so-called purity of painting as a unique type of art. For him, artists needed to find and bring out the essence of their chosen medium — this is called “medium specificity.” One of many problems with this influential theory, as it’s been pointed out throughout the years, is that this, too, is narrative. It’s a story about painting, to make sense of painting, and so even if abstract painting is operating differently, and skeins and drips are not symbolic of people and events, it still fits within the world of storytelling. After all, the idea that abstract art — whether Pollock’s Malevich’s or Mondian’s — could move completely beyond historical context is a story told by and within that context, a feeble hope that stems from challenging historical times and from artists with utopian and escapist bents suited to those times. When the Met’s label quotes Barnett Newman talking about using abstraction as a way to renew art after war, it’s relying on epic prose by an epic character in a story about epic art.
Intentionally or not, the show asks us: to what extent is storytelling necessary for art to have meaning? Around the time some of this show’s earliest painting was being made, literature, oddly enough, was asking similar questions, with the New Novel by Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Calvino refusing that their art be dominated by questions of plot. Is it enough to say that abstraction actually is a narrative form, simply telling a different story than figuration in a different way, or does at least some of it preserve a transgressive anti-narrativism that goes beyond being a pretty decoration for home or museum walls? This question is hard to answer, but, in my view, beautiful to chew on, and important to consider in a world that, to my mind, thoughtlessly valorizes stories, especially saccharine and manipulative ones. Greenberg’s depoliticized and ahistorical formalism may seem absurd today, but he did use it to try to protect art’s freedom and autonomy from totalitarian propaganda, Socialist Realism, which uses accessible figurative forms to create grotesque Stalin- and Hitler-loving fantasies. In a world of “alternative facts” and deeply misleading imagery, Greenberg’s concept that artistic independence can be found, and preserved, beyond “literary” narrative deserves some respect.
Greenberg undeniably gets tedious, and his voice is not the only one to consider here. Abstraction continued — not uncontested of course — into the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many of which had a strongly anti-narrative focus. Allan Kaprow (former teacher to my neighborhood friend, Cranky Bob) extended Pollock’s abstraction, which involved a vaguely choreographed dance above a canvas laid out on the floor, to performance or action in its own right and created an early performance-based avant-garde movement in its own right, Happenings. Happenings, like Judson Dance, Fluxus and much Performance Art to follow, draws slightly on theatrical conventions, but muddies them, and almost always avoids plot, subject matter, characters, beginning, middle, and end, and any convention that would ground it in old-fashioned rules of coherence. (This coherence was ridiculed as bourgeois and manipulative, and, frankly, as a literature lover who has always been suspicious of complicated plot lines, I think that’s valid.) These performances, and related photographs and videos, tend to involve people, and so they are figurative — and one of their aims was to break away from the “medium specificity” that defined “pure” painting — but the Met does include some abstraction that relates to this type of project, like Yayoi Kusama’s No. B 62 (1962) and the untitled Kazuo Shiraga from 1958, Jennifer Barlett’s Squaring (1973-74) that draws on conceptual art’s dry usage of language as a series of definitions to be interrogated. Bridget Riley’s Untitled (Sequence Study Towards “Paean”) and Untitled (Sequence Study Towards “Elysium,” both from 1973, could be included here too, since they draw on optical effects instead of plot devices. It’s a shame they did not include any of Yves Klein’s blue paintings or anthropometries from the 1950s and 1960s.
This is all to say that refusing conventional, comprehensible narrative structures is a large part of abstraction’s avant-garde thrust, or as least was during the postwar era, and abstraction’s potential to move art beyond chronological storytelling into some other realm is a theme that I think deserves more consideration in a story-obsessed world. The exhibition does not lean in to this theme as much as it could, but it encourages viewers to think about lack of narrative in art even as the word “epic” in the show’s title partially undercuts that reflection.
Just a Human Being Here 