American Century-1900 to 1950-Ronnie Landfield-Lyrical Abstraction-Whitney Museum-

Ronnie Landfield

New York Art World

The Whitney Museum Begins the American Century

The American Century: Art and Culture - Part 1 ,
1900—1950

The Whitney Museum of American Art
April 23—August 22

Art Review — NewYorkArtWorld ®

This season

the Whitney Museum of American Art presents The American Century: Art and Culture 1900—1950, part one of a planned double exhibition with part two of The American Century: Art and Culture 1950—2000 scheduled to open in September. The exhibition is both marvelous and utterly dreadful.

We are presented with a multi-level view of the first five decades of the century and the show subdivides into distinct eras such as World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, etc. Longtime Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell has taken on an enormous task and the show is overburdened with too much story to tell and uneven material.

Perhaps the current dictators in the art world are still threatened by the notion of intellectual independence, aesthetic individuality, artistic excellence, and high art?

At first

view the exhibition seems complete and it takes a while to realize that the Whitney Museum continues its long-term policy of undermining American painting and sculpture in subtle ways and in some not so subtle ways. This is about slick, sociological chicanery and not about great art. Like a wolf in sheep's clothing this exhibition pretends to be about art while it undermines American painting and sculpture.

The works in this exhibition depend upon literal content not quality. Mass culture, glam, kitsch, commercial art, and Hollywood are glorified and revered, photography is exalted, and with a few exceptions, American painters and sculptors are showcased in a poor light. Dozens of important American painters and sculptors, some still living and some dead, are left out.

Marcel Duchamp is represented by two facsimile pieces from 1964, in spite of his spending most of his professional career in Europe and not in America while Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hans Hofmann, and Milton Avery are left out altogether. The seeds of Pop and Conceptual Art have been carefully sown in part one. The thoughtful viewer's logical conclusion about what is to come in The American Century part two would be the new academy, cool art, the new salon of Post-Dada, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Pop, Video, and Post-Modern kitsch.

The tip off

to what the Whitney Museum is telling us—the art public—is in the title of the show and what they say and what they don't say about it. The American Century: Art and Culture 1900—2000, is a pretty catchy title. Henry Luce the owner of Life and Time magazines coined the phrase "The American Century" in 1941. Luce is credited for his catchy phrase (as if those were salient words from on high) on the book jacket and at least four times in the accompanying 408-page book.

However, Clement Greenberg, who for more than thirty years was known for his famous collection of essays Art and Culture, is ignored. 1 Greenberg who supplies Haskell with her subtitle is not credited and he is generally dissed whenever his name appears in this voluminous and informative text. Perhaps because his ideas about art were so opposed to what this show is all about and perhaps because the American Century as presented by the Whitney Museum is the antithesis of what Greenberg stood for.

Very

subtly the historical and traditional story of the development of American art in this century has been changed. We are being given a selective art history. American Dada is elevated to a more important position than it held, while dozens of artists whose works created the art of the thirties and forties are omitted. This false impression distorts the lineage of American art as it exists today.

This comes as no surprise because since 1973 this institution has suppressed its collection of abstract works from the late sixties as well as other works from other decades. This institution continues to suppress a generation of works by living American artists, which really is an outrage.

I've written before about the suppression of Lyrical Abstraction, but even I am appalled by the arrogant disrespect that the Whitney Museum displays toward American artists and to the American art public. I suspect that if she were alive Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would close them down—if she wasn't bowled over by the glitz and the glamour and the media attention paid to her museum.

The museum's annoying

and ever present politically-correct position works in its favor in this ambitious show given what they're trying to do in revealing every aspect of American artistic production on every level. The only special interest group not properly represented here are young children whose works are probably every bit as worthy as some of the inclusions. Art of every type including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, posters, architecture, fine, commercial and journalistic photography, commercial art, literature, furniture, design, and film is presented to represent each distinct time period in as broad a way as possible.

The American

character is presented as materialistic, optimistic, industrial, democratic, venal and entertainment-oriented, but the soul and the spirit of America are missing at the core as is the sense that, in the end, America produced important painting and sculpture of the best quality in the world. The problem with this show is that our attention is diverted through forty years of billboards, book jackets, bombast, and a lot of derivative painting and sculpture.

With a few exceptions like Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, and a few others America didn't consistently produce the best paintings and sculptures in the world until the Abstract Expressionists of the forties finally did. Suffice it to say then that the Whitney Museum tells the story of American art 1900—1950 with a surprisingly thin representation of Abstract Expressionism. Hans Hofmann, Milton Avery, James Brooks, Jack Tworkov, and the artist, of whom Jackson Pollock said "was the only American master that interests me," Albert Pinkham Ryder, are left out altogether.2 I would have liked to have seen a Ralph Blakelock, a Karl Knaths, a Myron Stout, a George McNeil, an Esteban Vicente, and a Will Barnet painting as well as dozens of others.

Our time

and attention are diverted by all mannerisms of American commercialism, movie posters, film clips, book jackets, souvenirs, comic books, propaganda posters, Tiffany glass, vases, craft, sociological display boards, journalism, literature, advertising photography, illustration, social realism, third- rate cubism and third-rate geometric abstractions.

Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Gerald Murphy are disabused when they are presented as prophets of Pop culture, and I question why facsimiles of Marcel Duchamp's urinal Fountain, signed r. mutt 1917, but actually made in 1964 and his shovel In Advance of a Broken Arm, 1915, also recreated in 1964, are presented as indispensable examples of American Dada.

Duchamp's presence in America began when he was twenty-eight years old when he fled France in 1915 to escape World War I and I would have hoped the Whitney Museum could have come up with the genuine articles.

The American character is presented as materialistic, optimistic, industrial, democratic, venal and entertainment-oriented, but the soul and the spirit of America are missing at the core as is the sense that, in the end, America produced important painting and sculpture of the best quality in the world.

The highlight

of the exhibition comes in the very beginning. Paintings by Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, the Ashcan School—William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Robert Henri—are solid and lend credibility and weight to the early days of the American century even though the paintings are stifling and conventional. Robert Henri's portrait of the Whitney Museum's founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney is particularly appropriate and enjoyable to see in this context.

Paintings by George Bellows, several early drawings by Joseph Stella and the accompanying photography of immigrants and urban life by Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, and others are also interesting and provocative. The last remaining residue of Art Nouveau is exemplified by a stunning Louis Comfort Tiffany glass window. Photographs by Edward Curtis, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, and others create an historical record and the setting for the first decade of the century.

However, as soon

as the Synchromists like Morgan Russell and other American abstractionists appear the show goes awry. Something very important and very necessarily American is missing from this period. Perhaps it's the presence of Duchamp or the poor quality of the paintings, or the total dependence on Cubism that dominated American art until the forties—but I suspect it is the absence of the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847—1917) had an enormous influence on American artists in the twentieth century. Although it is inconclusive whether he started any new paintings after 1900, he did paint on many of his paintings until his death in 1917. A beloved and respected figure in New York, especially among young American artists, Ryder was given a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in 1918. Moonlit Cove, 1880—1890. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection.

In the wake

of Ryders's absence there is a hollow contrivance to this exhibition. Ryder's work brought originality, substance and style to American painting at a time when most American artists went abroad to escape the stifling conventionality of American art. Ryder's work for all of its eccentricities is at the very soul of the American consciousness. Independent, romantic, mysterious, poetic, and as raw as the wind. Ryder's paintings created a real basis for a twentieth-century American art. Marsden Hartley in particular was inspired by Ryder. Hartley commented that when he saw Ryder's painting for the first time in 1909 it was like seeing a page from the Bible.

Of the dozen or so paintings of Ryder's in the 1913 Armory Show it was said by critic Charles Caffin: "In his unobtrusive sincerity he, in fact, anticipated that abstract expression toward which painting is returning and may almost be said to take his place as an old master in the modern movement."3 The visual basis of the works of the most interesting of this group of American painters like Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove and the great Marsden Hartley ultimately depended upon the work of the Cubists, the Fauves, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Most of those artists went to Europe and although their dependence on Cubism and Fauvism is apparent, the importance of Ryder is not acknowledged.

During the teens

and twenties the aforementioned Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Gerald Murphy produced marvelous hard-edged paintings mostly in Europe that I suspect were intended as American ironies at the time and in Davis' case, were not his best works. Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Hopper weigh in with powerful and haunting pictures of New York and Cape Cod.

On the whole the photography is much more interesting than the painting while Art Deco became the prevailing design and architectural style. Perhaps the dominance of photography was Alfred Stieglitz' revenge. The works of Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White and the elegant nudes of Edward Weston, Man Ray, Imogen Cunningham, and Charles Sheeler are a highlight of this part of the exhibition.

During the early

thirties the Great Depression took its toll. The photography of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, Berenice Abbott, and others recorded the lives, suffering, surrounding, and hardships Americans endured so movingly and on such a high aesthetic level that the best of these works transcends time.

The

Great Depression the thirties as American Art entered the dark ages with Social Realism and genre painting leading the way. The dreadfulness of this period for American artists is beyond description. Socially aware and socially conscious novels, films, music, mural painting, social realist painting addressed the ills of American society. The profound relevance and socio-political importance of this terrible time to the well being of the American character and future were incalculable. There is a special romantic nobility to this era in American art.

Painters and muralists addressed racism, poverty, and injustice.The Roosevelt Administration created the WPA (Works Project Administration) to create work for impoverished artists to help them survive. Neglected artists such as Milton Avery worked through their obscurity with quiet dignity. Avery, in particular, was an enormous influence on the young painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb who would become prominent in the forties and fifties. It¹s a shame that Milton Avery and others were overlooked by the Whitney curators.

The American Surrealist movement of the thirties seems to have missed the point altogether while developing the worst of Surrealism's innovations by turning toward Super Realism.

Perhaps the current dictators in the art world are still threatened by the notion of intellectual independence, aesthetic individuality, artistic excellence, and high art?

The best art

of the thirties includes the works of Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Alexander Calder, Ralston Crawford, Burgoyne Diller, and Arshile Gorky. Gorky is the first and the only American abstract painter of genuine originality to emerge at this point.

The gentle intensity and force of The Artist and His Mother is one of the great early masterpieces of Abstract Expressionist painting. The Gorky painting entitled Painting 1936—37 owes much to Miro, but it transcends European Surrealism. His magnificent Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944) begins the era that culminates in classical American Abstract Expressionism.

Arshile Gorky 1904—1948, The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1926—37. Oil on Canvas. Gift of Julien Levy for Maro & Natasha Gorky in memory of their father. Whitney Museum of American Art.

Perhaps the Whitney

Museum's most egregious mistake is the complete omission of one of the most important episodes in American art of the thirties. The resulting omission distorts, obscures, and changes the history of Modernist painting in America and creates a false impression that fails to depict the true origins of American Abstract Expressionism.

Although

Hans Hoffmann was unfortunately left out of this exhibition, his arrival in America in 1930 was one of the most hopeful highlights of the early thirties for the American art world. When the artist and teacher Hans Hofmann arrived in the United States from Germany to teach an art class at the University of California at Berkeley, a new era of American artistic achievement began.

Hofmann who was born in Bavaria in 1880 lived and painted in Paris from 1904 until 1914. He knew Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Kandinsky, and he was close friends with Robert Delaunay.

Hans Hofmann had firsthand knowledge of the advent of Fauvism, Cubism, and other important European Modernist movements and with his unique ability to teach what he knew he had much to offer to young American artists. His teaching was a catalyst that allowed American artists to approach Modernism in new and personal ways.

In 1932 with the aid

of Art Students League instructor Vaclav Vytlacil, a former Hans Hofmann student in Germany, Hofmann came to New York and taught briefly at the Art Students League in 1932—33. By 1933 the fifty-three-year-old Hans Hofmann opened his own art school in Manhattan. Hofmann permanently moved to New York and in 1941 he became an American citizen. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York City and his summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts became one of the most successful art schools in America attracting scores of young artists who went on to successful careers in painting and sculpture. Lee Krasner, who later married Jackson Pollock, was one of Hofmann's students.

Hans

Hofmann became known as a great teacher and later as a great Abstract Expressionist painter. Influential and articulate, Hofmann introduced European Modernism to his students and with his unique interpretation of Cubism changed the face of American art in the thirties and forties.

Hofmann wrote In Search Of the Real, a collection of essays outlining his lectures, teaching philosophy and theories about art—some of which were originally published by the Art Students League in The League Quarterly.4

In 1938

the Hans Hofmann School was located on 8th Street in Greenwich Village and it was a close neighbor to the fledgling Whitney Museum that was also located on 8th Street then. One of those people who regularly attended Hans Hofmann's lectures and was inspired by them was a man who would become the most controversial and influential voice in American Art in this century.

Influential as both an artist and a teacher, Hans Hoffmann's (1860-1966) impact on American art was felt as early as 1930. His work was excluded from the exhibition. Magenta and Blue, 1949—1950. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art. Copyright Estate of Hans Hoffmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

In 1939 Clement

Greenberg wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," the brilliant essay that catapulted the then somewhat obscure Greenberg to the vanguard of American art criticism. In that essay Greenberg dissects American art and culture; he suggests that high and low art can exist simultaneously at any given moment in our civilization. He goes on to define what he means by high and low art, and as an example, he draws the contrast between a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song; or a painting by Georges Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover; all being examples of contemporaneous culture.

Greenberg

clearly preferred high art and he goes on to outline why America as a culture needed to create and value high art. Art for its own sake, art that's content is art, art that only serves to create quality in art. Greenberg goes on to define high art by the degree to which the content of the art is in the meaning of the art itself. He says Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Miro, Cezanne, Klee, Matisse, Mondrian, and Kandinsky derived their chief inspiration from the medium they worked in.

(In his footnotes Greenberg credits this idea to a lecture by Hans Hofmann that he attended.)

Greenberg

said that subject matter and content per se didn¹t distinguish or define quality in high art. For Greenberg the degree of pure aesthetic content found in the T.S. Eliot poem as contrasted with the aesthetic content found in the Tin Pan Alley song defined quality in high art and created a scale of aesthetic values.

In his definition of the avant-garde Greenberg discounted the value of popularity or monetary success in the market place as a valid barometer of quality in high art. Mindful of the need for the fine arts of patronage since it tends to receive its support from an economic elite—which Greenberg feared was disappearing —he prophetically predicted a classless society brought about by the coming age of industrialization and a broad leisure class.

By kitsch Greenberg meant

all those popular and often commercial products and art forms that tended to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In music it might mean a popular showtune, in the visual arts perhaps a poster or an illustrative scene; in poetry the lyrics to a popular song. Greenberg outlined why high art threatened the status quo and promoted intellectual independence and aesthetic individuality. He points to Hitler's preference for kitsch and both Stalin and Hitler's abhorrence of modern art as an example of those totalitarian dictators' fears of freedom and independent thought.

Both

Clement Greenberg, as a writer and colleague of artists, and Hans Hofmann, as a prestigious teacher, theorist and practicing artist, had an enormous impact and influence on the development of new American art of the late thirties and the early forties. Greenberg developed many of his formalist ideas from what he learned from Hofmann. John Graham was another figure similar to Hofmann in New York then.

Graham, who came from Russia, wrote a treatise on modern art, painted, lectured on Modernism, and mentored younger artists with tales of his personal experiences with figures such as Picasso and Matisse in Paris and his other adventures in modern art circles in Europe. Among some of the younger artists that were close to John Graham were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. While a John Graham painting is included in the exhibition, I'd like to know why Hans Hofmann was excluded from the exhibition especially because the Whitney Museum owns Magenta and Blue, a great picture from 194950.

The

accompanying book pays short shrift to Greenberg briefly acknowledging his viewpoint, essays and his formalist theories and informs us that his ideas have been repudiated and dismissed by the art world.

Perhaps the current dictators in the art world are still threatened by the notion of intellectual independence, aesthetic individuality, artistic excellence, and high art? Personally I'm not of the same era of Clem Greenberg—I knew him and we agreed about some things and we disagreed a lot.

We held different viewpoints about many things, but I always respected what he did for American art in the forties. Greenberg was a great writer and his writing, more than anyone else's, made American Abstract Expressionism's position in the forefront of the avant-garde, clear.

The early forties saw

the end of American Social Realism and although American Mannerism survived in the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, John Steuart Curry, Ben Shahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and a few others, American Geometric Abstraction survived in the hands of Stuart Davis, Fritz Glarner, Alexander Calder, Burgoyne Diller, Joseph Albers, and a few others; but the dominating influence of Surrealism became paramount to the fledgling American artistic vanguard. Artists like David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, and several other artists are represented at the Whitney by Surrealist-inspired works.

World Wall II

brought massive upheavals to the world and many European artists sought refuge in New York. Henry Luce, the owner of Time and Life magazines, (and who coined the expression "The American Century" in 1941) featured warfront photography in his publications.

Much of the incredible photographic record of the war by Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and others that graced the pages of Luce's publications and other newspapers and magazines still defines for us today that chilling and calamitous era.

Photography

is one of the overall joys of this exhibition, mostly for its unique ability to convey fascinating and valuable historical information. Lisette Model and Weegee provided an unconventional and sometimes outright weird view of nightlife on the homefront while Robert Frank presented a wide ranging cross section of America and Aaron Siskind's work approached the abstraction of his friends' paintings like those of Franz Kline.

The forties ushered in the first great era of American painting and sculpture as Abstract Expressionism came of age and finally removed the yoke of European domination.

The final

rooms of the exhibition fall flat. The expected explosion of Abstract Expressionism never comes. That heroic era is ushered in with a whimper and with a thin group of almost token paintings and sculptures.

The curators seem to be sending us a message here—either it's just wait until part two opens in September or watch out all of you abstract painters and sculptors out there we are going to get you—we are changing history; politics is all and aesthetics are passe. Root, hog or die to quote Donald Judd. Perhaps the real message is a little bit of both.

Single works from

this period by Yves Tanguy, Mark Tobey, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Richard Pousette-Dart, Lee Mullican (whose inclusion is a welcome surprise), Lee Krasner, a couple of Mark Rothkos, a couple of Barnett Newmans—one from the mid-forties and a nice yellow zip painting from 1949, another great Arshile Gorky painting Betrothall, 1947, and sculptures by David Smith, Herbert Ferber, Theodore Roszak, and Isamu Noguchi finish the show with a disappointing anti-climax. The final painting in the exhibition is the silver, yellow and pink, Number 27 1950, by Jackson Pollock.

It is

as though the Whitney Museum had this titanic of a big party and they reluctantly invited the Abstract Expressionists to hold open the door. The guests of honor, the underlying powerhouse of American art is left waiting in the wings.

Would there have ever been a show like this in New York City if it wasn't for Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Hofmann, Gorky, Still, Tomlin, Brooks, Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Avery, David Smith, and Clement Greenberg? Or would we all be going to Paris and Berlin?

When all

is said and done this enormous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900—1950 falls far short of any expectations of experiencing the true greatness of American art.

The exhibition is too long, and the curators tell us that American art has triumphed, but they don't really deliver the high quality goods. The Abstract Expressionists put American art on the map and the Whitney Museum seems to take them for granted. This part of the exhibition is thin and is unfortunately also typical of how contemporary abstract painting has been treated by the Whitney since 1973. The museum often seems to resent good abstract painting and they resist showing it to the public—a public that I suspect really wants to see it if only they knew it existed.

The Whitney

Museum has a new director and he is apparently building a new curatorial staff that hopefully will begin a new era and clear the air for this often-beleaguered institution. Perhaps the new director and his fresh team at the Whitney Museum can set a better course for what once was a great institution. Optimism which is so vital to the American character consistently desires a happy ending.

I hope the need to satisfy a political will and agenda will modify to satisfy a real appetite for great works of painting and sculpture that are aesthetic and sound. If not then I shudder to think what this institution will bring us in part two of their politically-correct, dumbed down, all things being equal, kitsch filled celebration of The American Century: Art and Culture 1950—2000.

Go to: The American Century —1950-2000 — Part 2

Notes:

1. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961)

2. "Jackson Pollock," California Arts and Arhitecture (April 1944), p. 14.

3. Charles Caffin, "International Still Stirs the Public," and "The American Section Still Reflects the Nationalistic Motive." New York American, March 10, 1913, p. 8.

4. The Art Students League of New York Archives.

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