It’s rather unnerving to visit, within the course of a single week, exhibitions devoted to Willem de Kooning, one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism (at the Guggenheim Museum), and Sol LeWitt, high priest of Conceptualism (at the Museum of Modern Art; it will travel to Montreal, Champaign, Ill., and La Jolla, Calif.). Neither artist can be considered representative of the avant garde—if there is such a thing today, a question that can be endlessly debated—for Abstract Expressionism was relegated to history more than twenty years ago (though many of its representatives, like Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and, of course, de Kooning himself, are still active); while Conceptualism, sometimes defined as the attempt to divorce art from the traditions surrounding it, is being pushed aside by the “back to real painting” movement that reportedly is exciting the under-thirty generation. Still, the two shows are a fascinating contrast.
In a way, Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism, as personified by de Kooning and LeWitt, represent the two extremes between which art has been oscillating for the last two hundred years—namely, Romanticism and Classicism. De Kooning is all raw, subjective emotion, every stroke of his brush or palette-knife expressive of his inner obsessions, while LeWitt is all theory and calculation, his personality so detached from the final work that once he has figured out the geometry, plane or solid, of a particular piece, he can rely on a corps of assistants to execute it. What he sells are the specifications; anyone can carry them out.
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