Abstract painting has been awakened at dawn, marched out to the firing-squad wall and granted a last-minute reprieve so many times that it’s impossible for it to live a normal life. In an art world that increasingly judges art by the political causes it supports, abstract painting has developed a shuffling gait and a thousand-yard stare. A terminal case of cultural irrelevance has clearly settled in. But every once in a while a kindly curator comes along, slaps its cheeks and counsels hope.
This time (at New York’s Andre Emmerich Gallery, through Jan. 25) the benefactor is art historian Barbara Rose and a show entitled “Abstract Painting: The ’90s.” It’s a sequel to Rose’s “American Painting: The Eighties,” audaciously mounted in 1979 at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and sent on a tour of European and American venues. Almost all the 25 artists in “The ’90s” are alumni of the larger (41 artists) “Eighties” show. Critic Hilton Kramer said at the time that much of the painting in the first show looked like abstract expressionism with a college education. The work in this one has felt the effects of the recession and come home to live with Mom.
Or maybe with Auntie Mame. Rose, 54, was once married to art superstar Frank Stella, and their divorce was followed by a noisy child-support dispute. In 1981, she was appointed curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts but refused to let go of her position as art critic for Vogue magazine. In 1984 she gave a fateful interview to Artspace, a Southwest magazine, in which she railed against Houston’s cultural shortcomings. That July, she mailed in her resignation. Rose then founded the recently deceased Journal of Art, a kind of USA Today for esthetes, with news bulletins from everywhere and loopy editorials. One suggested that Desert Storm vets who went to art school on a new GI Bill could reform the bratty art world (“Members of the volunteer army have already demonstrated they possess the discipline and taste for risk taking that is the basis for genuine creativity”).
Beneath the eccentricity, Rose is something of a moralist. In the catalog essay for “The ’90s,” she announces that “aesthetics and ethics are one” and that the alleged return of abstract painting “to the forefront of the current art scene is … a response to the confusion, degradation and moral turpitude of our time.” Justification by righteousness instead of retina seems an odd tack for Rose to take. A month prior to her arrival in Houston, the museum just happened to purchase $80,000 worth of art from the collection of her husband at the time, rock lyricist Jerry Leiber (he wrote Elvis’s “Hound Dog”). Rose denied any knowledge of the sale. “The Eighties” turned out to be a package (including a painting previously in Rose’s collection) wholly owned by something called the Foundation Fine Art of the Century in Geneva. (Rose said it made shipping and insurance simpler.) With “The ’90s,” at least, the commercial aspect is up front: every painting is for sale at Emmerich.
The central problem faced by the artists in “Abstract Painting: The ’90s” is that, basically, all the prototypes have been covered by the likes of Mondrian, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Motherwell and Still. It’s hard to get inspired working in the cracks between them. Nevertheless, painters are tenacious and in “The ’90s” they’ve come up with four strategies that might be called retro, funk, horsepower and hyper-sensitivity. Retro means smartly playing dumb, as if automobiles were still called motorcars and abstraction were still art’s cutting edge. Elaine Lustig Cohen is the most retro, with a little canvas of overlapping planes and stippled paint evoking hot times in Paris, circa 1931. Funkiness is the bright, bold, lick-and-a-promise solution to not being able to paint as subtly as de Kooning. Since hardly any younger painter can, funkiness is the most competitive category in the exhibition. Katherine Porter tacks her garish canvas, rather like a hide, to the front of a colored stretcher frame to give it a non-Western boost. William Ridenhour’s finger-painty allusions to breasts, chicken feet and the tropics might fare better displayed on a refrigerator, with strawberry magnets.
Horsepower tries to disguise abstract painting’s fall from radicality to revisionism with dazzling, tricky effects. In the horsepower race, the veteran Washington painter Sam Gilliam wins by a mile. His Max Headroomesque “Dancing Scenes” (1991) features thick, glossy shards of combed paint on a ground of splattered fabric, all on top of more splatters. You can’t help thinking that it really wants to be a sculpture (specifically, a John Chamberlain) and can’t quite break free. If any painting sums up the whole show, it’s Richard Hennessy’s “Chest Expander” (1991). It looks as if every artist in the exhibition worked on it for 15 minutes in order to come up with a manual for abstract painting good until the year 2000.
The best stuff in “The ’90s”–the paintings of Dennis Ashbaugh, Louisa Chase, Hermine Ford and Gary Stephan–relies on delicacy and sensitivity. The D&S approach isn’t foolproof: Georges Noel’s beige, sandy-surfaced “Altamira” (1990) looks like graffiti done by a maitre d’. And it can get a trifle cute, as in Ashbaugh’s stained burgundy “Designer Gene” (1991). When a genuinely sophisticated painter like Gary Stephan tries it with scroll-like shapes wobbling atop tall, flimsy pedestals in “Oceans and Ovens” (1991), the result is beauty without prettiness, mystery without spookiness. Stephan’s floating, sitting semi-things flirt with what some critics used to refer to as “homeless representation” and almost disqualify the painting as abstract.
“Abstract Painting: The ’90s” amounts to a rear-guard action with too many techniques and not enough ideas. The exhibition has the middle-of-the-road look of a faculty show. Abstract painting will probably never return to the glory it enjoyed in early- and midcentury; there are simply too many talented young artists being won over to media and styles that have nothing to do with the tradition of painting. Several abstract painters who are not in the show, however, are capable of leading at least a mini-renaissance in abstraction-David Novros, Louise Fishman, John Millei and Thomas Nozkowski, for examples. They’re within the generational brackets of “The ’90s” but work in grudging, troubled styles that creak like Yoda’s voice with the wisdom of sheer perseverance. Bill Jensen’s 1989-90 “Ochre Sound for Ronnie” comes closest to representing that sensibility in the exhibition. If Rose hadn’t limited herself to a reunion of “The Eighties,” more of it could have been included. And more, in this case, would have been better, much better.
Intended or not, there’s a user’s manual lurking in Barbara Rose’s new show about art in the ’90s. The organizer (above) and a few of her implied rules:
