Each year the Whitney Museum of American Art stages an Annual of contemporary painting and sculpture in New York. Considered one of the foremost displays of contemporary art in the country, this season’s round-up was adversely reviewed. In the New York Herald Tribune Emily Genauer disliked the show for its plethora of “huge, formless, brash, blotchy, shapeless abstract-expressionist pictures so like each other that even a critic trained to spot an artist’s style from a square inch of canvas seen at fifty paces, is hard put to distinguish one from the other.” In particular she criticized for their aesthetic emptiness a number of “first-class, sensitive talents who used to have something to say about men and their world.”
It would be nice to think that the partisan “plugging” of individual painters that proceeds apace on this sort of level wastes itself on the zephyrs, but the Whitney Annual belies this hope. Thanks to coterie propaganda, someone really believes that Grace Hartigan is capable of painting a picture, that Robert Motherwell’s nonsense in mud has some sort of importance. In literature not public neglect merely, but criticism grounded on formal standards would have seen most of this sort of thing off with a hearty guffaw years ago.
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