Art: Op, Pop—And The Real Thing

AS THE 1966-67 ART SEASON draws to its close, one wonders whether New York’s patient and long put-upon art lovers may finally be given a respite from the constant succession of synthetic styles, movements, “isms” masquerading as high art to which they have been subjected for the past decade. This year, to the chagrin of those sophisticates for whom keeping up with the latest art fad is tantamount to keeping up with the Joneses, there has been nothing ‘“new’’—only warmed-over recastings of last year’s shockers which no longer shock. Even the museums had an off year. Loan shows were few and unexciting —in contrast to the so-called hinterland which has witnessed a number of great master exhibitions, any one of which would have done credit to the Metropolitan. Philadelphia and Chicago were treated to a fine Manet display; a full-length Ingres survey was put on by Harvard’s scholarly Fogg Museum; San Francisco, Toledo and Boston all saw “The Age of Rembrandt,” while even the small Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond managed to come up with a Hogarth show which attracted national attention. The season’s most distinguished offering was the Cleveland Museum’s “Treasures from Medieval France,” to which the French government contributed importantly. Of course, those dealers and museums which consider themselves tastemakers and show cases for the avantgarde did what they could to maintain their reputations. Sidney Janis’ season opener, “Erotic Art,’ was neither erotic nor otherwise interest ing. The Guggenheim Museum’s “Systemic Painting” (the term a pretentious tag-line for yet another showing of ‘“Hard-Edge” abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and their followers) was pretty boring stuff. The Jewish Museum saluted Minimal Art with a show of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, in which, with effort and eyestrain, the spectator could dimly discern the squares into which the canvases were divided. It also reviewed the “achievement,” if such it can be called, of the Parisian Yves Klein, complete with paintings produced by coating a nude girl with blue paint and rolling her on a paper-covered floor. The Whitney Museum Annual, this year devoted to sculpture with a leavening of prints to brighten up the walls, resolutely provided a comprehensive, if unedifying, summary of all the most up-to-date “isms.” A few fine pieces by members of the older generation were swamped in the profusion of Op, Pop, Minimal and Kinetic (nearly everything moved or flashed lights), all as devoid of feeling as a TV commercial. “Psychedelic” art which, expectably, arose in San Francisco and has staked out a New York outpost in the East Village, is an obviously phony attempt to concretize the fantasies of LSD and other drugs. To a clear-eyed observer, it seems purely derivative from old-time Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism plus Art Nouveau— hardly revolutionary.

NINETEEN SIXTY-SEVEN’s failure to produce anything which could have _ been called “new” was pointed up by the fact that the three most important retrospectives—those of Andrew Wyeth and Louise Nevelson at the Whitney, and that of Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art— all recalled the more productive days of American art ten and more years ago. The most outstanding, if only for the record crowds it attracted, was the Wyeth. The reasons for his popularity—he has long commanded higher prices than any other living — American painter—are obvious. He simply paints what he sees, affording to the most unsophisticated viewer a pleasurable “shock of recognition,” which modern art has resolutely denied him. Wyeth’s haunting landscapes of his native Pennsylvania and of the Maine coast where he spends his summers are not, however, mere literal transcription of observed facts, nor are his careful portraits of his family and neighbors. Though most ef his pictures are preceded by detailed, on-the-spot studies, the finished works are subtly different from their originals, for Wyeth selects and arranges his canvases as carefully as Cezanne. His art is rooted in American nineteenth-century realism: yet his brilliant, almost Dali-like drawing, his often daring compositions make him very much a part of our own time, despite the nostalgia he, like the poet Robert Frost, evokes for a vanishing, rural America. Louise Nevelson, unlike Wyeth, has developed slowly and hesitantly; it was not until the 1950s that she discovered her distinctive way of working with “found” wooden objects— old orange crates, boxes, bits of driftwood, chair legs, mouldings, bed posts, bowling pins, children’s blocks. The huge sectional walls and columnar forms which she builds from these disparate elements are baroque in their intricacy, their play of light and shade, solid and void—and modern in the way their individual components lose their original identity and take on a new, abstract existence. Today, ownership of a Nevelson is de rigueur for any museum with pretensions in the contemporary field. Yet only in the Whitney’s lofty third-floor gallery with its adjustable lighting did Mrs. Nevelson’s special sorcery come into its own. Here these gigantic structures, monochromatically painted black, white or gold, ~ seemed like magic architectures evoking within the spectator moods varying from gaiety to foreboding, from awe to tenderness. With humble, unsculptural means, Louise Nevelson has created a new kind of monumental furniture, latter-day altarpieces for a secular age.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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AS THE 1966-67 ART SEASON draws to its close, one wonders whether New York’s patient and long put-upon art lovers may finally be given a respite from the constant succession of synthetic styles, movements, “isms” masquerading as high art to which they have been subjected for the past decade. This year, to the chagrin of those sophisticates for whom keeping up with the latest art fad is tantamount to keeping up with the Joneses, there has been nothing ‘“new’’—only warmed-over recastings of last year’s shockers which no longer shock. Even the museums had an off year. Loan shows were few and unexciting —in contrast to the so-called hinterland which has witnessed a number of great master exhibitions, any one of which would have done credit to the Metropolitan. Philadelphia and Chicago were treated to a fine Manet display; a full-length Ingres survey was put on by Harvard’s scholarly Fogg Museum; San Francisco, Toledo and Boston all saw “The Age of Rembrandt,” while even the small Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond managed to come up with a Hogarth show which attracted national attention. The season’s most distinguished offering was the Cleveland Museum’s “Treasures from Medieval France,” to which the French government contributed importantly. Of course, those dealers and museums which consider themselves tastemakers and show cases for the avantgarde did what they could to maintain their reputations. Sidney Janis’ season opener, “Erotic Art,’ was neither erotic nor otherwise interest ing. The Guggenheim Museum’s “Systemic Painting” (the term a pretentious tag-line for yet another showing of ‘“Hard-Edge” abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and their followers) was pretty boring stuff. The Jewish Museum saluted Minimal Art with a show of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, in which, with effort and eyestrain, the spectator could dimly discern the squares into which the canvases were divided. It also reviewed the “achievement,” if such it can be called, of the Parisian Yves Klein, complete with paintings produced by coating a nude girl with blue paint and rolling her on a paper-covered floor. The Whitney Museum Annual, this year devoted to sculpture with a leavening of prints to brighten up the walls, resolutely provided a comprehensive, if unedifying, summary of all the most up-to-date “isms.” A few fine pieces by members of the older generation were swamped in the profusion of Op, Pop, Minimal and Kinetic (nearly everything moved or flashed lights), all as devoid of feeling as a TV commercial. “Psychedelic” art which, expectably, arose in San Francisco and has staked out a New York outpost in the East Village, is an obviously phony attempt to concretize the fantasies of LSD and other drugs. To a clear-eyed observer, it seems purely derivative from old-time Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism plus Art Nouveau— hardly revolutionary.

NINETEEN SIXTY-SEVEN’s failure to produce anything which could have _ been called “new” was pointed up by the fact that the three most important retrospectives—those of Andrew Wyeth and Louise Nevelson at the Whitney, and that of Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art— all recalled the more productive days of American art ten and more years ago. The most outstanding, if only for the record crowds it attracted, was the Wyeth. The reasons for his popularity—he has long commanded higher prices than any other living — American painter—are obvious. He simply paints what he sees, affording to the most unsophisticated viewer a pleasurable “shock of recognition,” which modern art has resolutely denied him. Wyeth’s haunting landscapes of his native Pennsylvania and of the Maine coast where he spends his summers are not, however, mere literal transcription of observed facts, nor are his careful portraits of his family and neighbors. Though most ef his pictures are preceded by detailed, on-the-spot studies, the finished works are subtly different from their originals, for Wyeth selects and arranges his canvases as carefully as Cezanne. His art is rooted in American nineteenth-century realism: yet his brilliant, almost Dali-like drawing, his often daring compositions make him very much a part of our own time, despite the nostalgia he, like the poet Robert Frost, evokes for a vanishing, rural America. Louise Nevelson, unlike Wyeth, has developed slowly and hesitantly; it was not until the 1950s that she discovered her distinctive way of working with “found” wooden objects— old orange crates, boxes, bits of driftwood, chair legs, mouldings, bed posts, bowling pins, children’s blocks. The huge sectional walls and columnar forms which she builds from these disparate elements are baroque in their intricacy, their play of light and shade, solid and void—and modern in the way their individual components lose their original identity and take on a new, abstract existence. Today, ownership of a Nevelson is de rigueur for any museum with pretensions in the contemporary field. Yet only in the Whitney’s lofty third-floor gallery with its adjustable lighting did Mrs. Nevelson’s special sorcery come into its own. Here these gigantic structures, monochromatically painted black, white or gold, ~ seemed like magic architectures evoking within the spectator moods varying from gaiety to foreboding, from awe to tenderness. With humble, unsculptural means, Louise Nevelson has created a new kind of monumental furniture, latter-day altarpieces for a secular age.