A Visit to the National Gallery, a High Point in the Swamp

It’s back to the ’70s in a first-rate photo show; plus, an overstuffed, overwrought Elizabeth Catlett show. But the place, as always, looks great.

L ast week, I was in the Swamp for the National Review Institute’s biennial Ideas Summit and, afterward, a round of museum visits. I loved meeting so many NR readers at the summit, hearing the talks, and seeing people who are, to me, celebrities. I visited the National Gallery of Art, a rare triumph in the realm of private philanthropy working together with the government. Andrew Mellon, once the secretary of the Treasury, pledged his art collection for a national art museum, built the NGA’s elegant building, and corralled some of his potentate friends to give their collections as well.

The museum has gone onward and upward since then. It’s still government-owned, but it has a lively donor base. Its exhibitions and scholarly programs tend to be very good.

I saw two exhibitions — The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography and Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies — and liked one more than the other. The ’70s Lens shows the art of my high school and college years, so, naturally, I feel much empathy for it as well as the skepticism that comes with experience. On Catlett, she’s not a bad artist, but a little of her work goes a long way, and what was on view was a glut. She’s a one-note belter.

First, The ’70s Lens, which closes in two weeks and, alas, isn’t traveling. Nearly all the work is from the NGA’s collection. “In the 1970s,” the show begins, “the United States was rocked by uncertainty.” Indeed, and then some. The Misery Index, gas lines, the Watergate coup d’état, inflation, Laos, the OPEC sheiks, Iran’s hostages, Chernobyl, the Pentagon Papers, Pol Pot, the Munich ’72 Summer Olympics, the Red Brigades, the IRA, Hanoi Jane, Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, the Twinkie Defense, and the Year of the Three Popes. They ran out of Italians and picked a Pole!

Margaret Thatcher, Mary Tyler Moore, and disco brightened the gloom, as did Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker. Incandescent after a drunken brawl with her married congressman boyfriend, the powerful Wilbur Mills, she threw herself into the Tidal Basin.

The ’70s were, by and large, a grim, trying time, but art from the era had many high points, most in photography. The exhibition defines “documentary photography” as representing people, places, and events, usually from everyday life, accurately but solicitously, with a nudge toward social change. It’s a ’30s term fashioned to describe photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee, though there were many others, who specialized in documenting and visualizing America as real people lived it. Realism — and the quirks of our big country — has been our default aesthetic since the days of Copley, but in the ’70s, documentary photographers took the plunge into the world of new subjects such as ghetto life, intimate spaces, and fringe cultures.

The show begins with Robert Cumming’s 67-Degree Body Arc Off Circle Center, from 1975, and Sophie Rivera’s Untitled, from 1978, and her Nuyorican Series. Cumming is hard to classify. The photograph, big and bold, is documentary and surreal. It’s a self-portrait in profile, his back arched, precise, even scientific, but funny. Rivera’s photograph is big, too, but it’s a frank, in-your-face depiction of a Puerto Rican woman. They both have wall power and emphasize that The ’70s Lens is a human — and humane — proposition, and both intrigue. There are eight works by Rivera in the exhibition, each abandoning stereotypes for inquiring individuality.

The first gallery is about communities that at the time were on the margins, and when the photographers discarded the historic role of documentarians as recording poverty and other social ills and, instead, sought idiosyncrasies and developed deeper relationships. Many of us know Nan Goldin and Peter Hujar, but some names, such as Frank Espada, Sunil Gupta, and the very good Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, were new to me.

This works at times, but not always. Moutoussamy-Ashe photographed the tiny community of Gullah people living on islands off the coast of South Carolina, descended from slaves and still, at least in the late ’70s, speaking with a thick Creole accent. A bride-to-be, wearing fuzzy skippers as she dresses for her wedding, is charming. Two black men are nattily dressed, not necessarily prosperous but empowered. Espada is an artist and community organizer who specialized in the Puerto Rican diaspora and invests his subjects, he says, with “the courage and determination to endure, survive, and overcome.” Hujar’s two portrait photographs depict the movie director John Waters and the awful Susan Sontag.

I would have done it differently. Hujar’s two subjects are famous, but at least Sontag is a bourgeois socialist icon and far from everyday life. I would have chosen Hujar’s scenes of everyday life in gay New York, just emerging from shadows, though these two photographs, each showing the figure lying down, suggest a trust developed from friendship with the artist. It’s documentarian but up close and personal. Espada’s work seems to make every Puerto Rican subject a hero simply for being Puerto Rican. This seems closer to sentimental Victorian narrative than what I’d expect from the gritty, nuanced 1970s.

One big change in ’70s photography is the emergence of the photographer as a performer. Performance art went big then, with the artist’s body as the primary source of material in a way that’s more narrative than, say, a self-portrait. In photography, it’s both truth and fiction and, ultimately, another ’70s revolution. Work by Francesca Woodman, David Wojnarowicz, and Cindy Sherman — surprisingly absent from the show — gave hierarchies and boundaries a pounding. What’s a self-portrait? What’s narrative? It’s gonzo journalism edging its way into high art.

I loved the section on ’70s color photography. We expect color images now, but it wasn’t until the ’60s that commercial color film crept into art photography, which prized black-and-white. Color was shrill and common and for family photographs à la Kodak and advertising. William Eggleston and William Christenberry star here.

Both focused on subjects in the Deep South, often ramshackle architecture endowed by color with the looks of an old movie star, pretty, now decaying and flirting with death, but still mustering a touch of glam. Helen Leavitt worked in black-and-white for years but, in the ’70s, found it too abstract, so she turned to color for a closer view of street life. Still, even in color, The ’70s Lens has plenty of period pieces. Mitch Epstein’s Massachusetts Turnpike, from 1973, made me smile. Yes, the world actually looked like that once.

A gallery called Intimate Documentary brings to mind An American Family, the early ’70s PBS documentary series about the William C. Loud family in California. This part of the show recalls the theme of so much angst unfolding behind a quiet, suburban facade. The ’70s launched our confessional culture, with the private and personal sphere bleeding into the public arena. Bill Owens’s Suburbia portfolio, from 1972, gets a good look. Conformity, always a human impulse, and freedom jostle. Suburban life meant a loosening of family and community ties, as did American mobility. Owens’s photographs are both straightforward and nuanced. Yes, life in the suburbs — his are in Northern California — might be banal, but there’s gentle humor, too. Ronald Reagan, once a TV and movie actor but, by 1972, California’s governor, appears in an old Western film on a television in a home bedecked for Christmas. Things are neat as a pin, and a Nativity Scene rests on fake clouds on top of the TV, a microcosm of Heaven and Earth.

I didn’t know Martha Rosler’s work, but her series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, from the early ’70s, is about the Vietnam War as the living room war where combat and affluent domestic spaces are a queasy combination. Michael Jang’s Study Hall, from 1973, depicts an Asian-American family on the way to assimilation in American values through mass media.

As much as the ’70s were snakebit, The ’70s Lens makes an effective case that the time’s photography lived in the same zeitgeist as movies. Network, Chinatown, Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Nashville, Being There — the list goes on — still have bite. The old adage among art histories is that the ’70s were the decade when painting died. I’d quibble with that. Rather, it finally made way for photography at the top of Olympus.

I enjoyed The ’70s Lens for the usual high quality of the NGA’s presentation, the many artists I didn’t know, and the memories it evokes, few assuaged by time since I’m not sentimental. Though the exhibition starts with a focus on marginalized communities, it more or less drops it, since that’s only a slice of the ’70s. Larry Fink’s Studio 54, from 1977, defines the ’70s, too. And almost everything in the show comes from the NGA’s collection, so it’s confined by what it owns. Tumult and despair incubate good art, and The ’70s Lens proves it.

Elizabeth Catlett, the other anchor exhibition now at the NGA, is a retrospective of the American printmaker and sculptor who spent most of her career in Mexico City, where she was an art professor. Living from 1915 to 2012, and working into the early 2000s, she kept faith with Modernist icons such as Henry Moore, Diego Rivera, Brancusi, and, I learned, Grant Wood, with whom she studied. Her prints depicting imaginary black women are arresting — strong, tough, and dynamic. Starting in the 1950s, she did lots of sculpture, which suffers from sameness.

The exibition is immense and would have flattered Catlett far more had it been kept to 40 or so objects. I’m not sure how much of a revolutionary she was, since she was a tenured university professor. She was an ardent proponent of decolonizing and intersectional theories, which repel me, a mother of the Black Panther Movement, and an enabler of Castro communism. She reminds me of Lillian Hellman. Catlett was cultured and creative, but, like Hellman, she was a Trot who, if given the chance, would ship infidels to the gulag. The latter part of the subtitle — and All That It Implies — necessarily puts her politics front and center. It’s a case where biography trumps the art. The catalogue is beautifully produced, as are all NGA books, but it veers toward deification and aims the high-speed bellows at the incense burners.

While many Washington museums went vegan whole-hog woke, the NGA, mostly, has been circumspect, the Catlett show notwithstanding. There was much work to be done at the NGA to change hiring, pay, and promotion practices so that women especially were fairly treated. A more broad-minded exhibition program was a good idea, too, for the sake of variety and curiosity. It’s building a strong photography collection with special attention to younger artists whose prices are reasonable. We don’t know whether or not these works will stand the test of time, but I do know that the NGA’s curators have good taste.