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Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield © 1999 All Rights Reserved. |
The Whitney Museum Ends the American Century The American Century: Art and Culture - Part 2,1950-2000 The Whitney Museum of American Art September 26, 1999—February 13, 2000 |
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The Whitney Museum would
scream bloody murder about its first amendment rights if anyone objected
to their right to exhibit a work like the sculpture of a defecating
woman by Kiki Smith in their current exhibition.
I wonder about violations of
artists' first amendment rights when an institution like the Whitney
Museum elects to keep hundreds of works hidden from public view. When
does the museum's action cross the line and become a violation of freedom
of speech?
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An American art world that tolerates the type of dictatorial, cultural elitism that infects this institution and others gets what it deserves. The hour is late, aesthetic censorship is a serious issue and the time has come for people to speak up. Artists have power and artists have a responsibility to let their views be heard. The old saw, "My work speaks for itself," is a little pale in comparison to what our museums have been doing to us lately. | The real scandal is not what the Whitney Museum shows, but what it doesn't show. In the real world at Y2K, it's Root, Hog or Die.2 In its attempt to define its version of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, the museum leaves out wholesale chunks of great American art. The museum presents a phony picture filled with revisions and remakes of history. Does anybody care? |
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Prelude
to Catastrophe
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Works that are about the pleasures of paint, drawing, surface, material, color, feeling, sensuality, pure visual language, visual ideas, plastic space, beauty, and intuitive expressions are, by and large, not shown. Representational works that resonate with intimate and precise perceptions, delicate sensibility, and rough-hewn expressivity are not to be found. Painting and sculpture are used and abused to demonstrate political motifs. |
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Displayed throughout the museum is the new art school academy of pluralism: Anti-Art, Post-Dada, Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Earth Art-ism, Post-Earth Art-ism, Conceptualism, Post-Conceptualism, Deconstructivism, Neo-Expressionism, Performance Art-ism, Video-ism, Neo-Geo-ism, Post-Neo-Geo-ism, Installationism, Appropriationalism, and the other new isms like commercialism, sexism, political-correctism, careerism, corporation controlism, shock the publicism, egotism, opportunism, and Post-Modernism. |
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At the Whitney I felt as if I were in a mausoleum, drowned in darkness, and trapped by the lifelessness of the selections. I had the eerie feeling of seeing the work as though it were in prison or in the zoo. There is a pervasive deadness that haunts this show. What might have been a great exhibition with more than an occasional flash of genuine artistic power and brilliance is brutally botched. |
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Consequently, the eighties, and the nineties are presented with a one-eyed view, based on a revised history, that is flatly inaccurate. By showcasing exactly what it pleases and disregarding history, the Whitney Museum makes a ludicrous farce of its enterprise. |
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Even trying to figure out the chronology of the works in this mixed up, tangled mess is impossible because the curatorial style of Lisa Phillips and her associates is haphazard, sloppy, confused, illogical, and leaves us with a hodgepodge. They stick Robert Mangold's minimal painting in the basement, instead of on the fourth floor with Minimal Art, and Alfred Leslie's Abstract Expressionist painting is in the lobby for no apparent reason, while the rest of Abstract Expressionism is on the fifth floor. |
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Once again painting and sculpture is dissed, abstraction is all but eliminated, and politics and artbiz dominate. The show is bad but the accompanying 400-page book is worse.3 One assertion of many that I found particularly hypocritical appeared on pages 55—56: |
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As though her exhibition doesn't gorge us to tedium with art as corporate investment. Although most artists want to sell their work, she implies that it's legitimate for a Conceptual work or a Rauschenberg to sell to IBM, but if a Noland is collected by that same company, it must have been sold just as decoration... I don't think so. |
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Although I kind of like some of it, most of the recent works displayed are aimed to shock, are devoid of feeling, slightly hysterical, and morally bankrupt. | Irritating and unnerving and with an egocentric need for attention, very few of the most recent works appear even to hope to be universal or lasting, let alone masterpieces of universal expression.The few great artists the Whitney includes like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and a few others, carry this show on their backs. The museum cops out on its suggestion of a so-called triumphant American Century. |
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Theater
of the Absurd
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Like a textbook from Southern California Conceptual art heaven, we go from the absurd into the ridiculous on a nightmarish journey fraught with historical omissions, hypocritical assertions, erroneous assumptions, bad curatorial decisions, and bad scholarship. Make no mistakeóthis is the new academia, the salon, the safe and the corporate, artistic censorship, aesthetic suppression on a big scale—all screened behind a cynical, hypocritical, and cowardly shield of radical politics. |
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Alongside and to the right of the verticalized Pollock there are four small, handsome, square paintings, which are stacked vertically. On the adjacent wall to the right, are four more vertically stacked Pollock paintings. These resemble the eight small paintings that Pollock included in his 1950 Betty Parsons Gallery show that flanked the horizontal Autumn Rhythm (1950). |
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Jackson Pollock's 1950 Parsons exhibition was dominated by huge horizontal paintings, including his 1950 masterpieces: Lavender Mist, Autumn Rhythm, Number 32, 1950, and One: Number 31, 1950. If he chose to hang Number 27, 1950 as a vertical, he surely had his reasons: space limitations, a friend's suggestion, or a whim. I am not convinced that the painting in the photograph is Number 27, 1950, but if Pollock opted to show it vertically in 1950—51, he changed his mind by 1953, finishing it as a horizontal painting. |
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Are they trying to create a contrived controversy? The Museum contends that their vertical hanging resurrects a long forgotten, albeit obscure, precedent. However, and rather ironically, nothing else in this exhibition can claim to be so historically-minded. If the Whitney Museum curators think their display of Jackson Pollock is so, it is the only place in the entire exhibition where they are. Everywhere else is a jumbled mishmash of historical incoherence and error. |
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What is called "The Second Generation" is often represented by works that are concurrent with or predate the works by the people who are called First Generation. Included among the Abstract Expressionists are important works by Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956), Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red (1958), Clyfford Still, Untitled (1949), Barnett Newman, Day One (1951—52), Philip Guston, Dial (1956), capped off by Willem de Kooning's Door to the River (1960), which is the best de Kooning the museum owns. |
Grace Hartigan's Sweden (1959) and Joan Mitchell's Hemlock (1956), are unexceptional works and Lee Krasner is represented by the largest painting in the show, The Seasons (1957). The Alfred Leslie painting hung in the lobby, Big Green (1957), is an example of his Abstract Expressionist period that should have been hung in this room. A Mark di Suvero sculpture, Hankchampion (1960), and eight Louise Bourgeois sculptures complete the tableau. |
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The inclusion of so many Bourgeois sculptures are strange since as Phillips herself acknowledges in her catalogue, no one recognized her enterprise as particularly consequential or mainstream at the time.5 |
Why, then, does this artist have eight pieces in this room, while artists who were well regarded at the time and who are still well regarded and influential have none? Is Phillips attempting to rewrite history? The installation at the Whitney reflects blatant, if not radical, revisionism. |
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Where is the sculpture by Alexander Calder, Rueben Nakian, Ibram Lassaw, David Hare, Richard Stankiewitcz, Sidney Geist, Raoul Hague, Philip Pavia, Theodore Roszak, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Seymour Lipton, Richard Lippold, George Rickey, George Sugarman, Gabe Kohn, Len Lye, Dale Eldred, Robert Mallary, or Peter Agostini? Or paintings by Hedda Sterne, I. Rice Pereira, Robert Goodnough, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Lenore Jaffee, Hassell Smith, Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, Lester Johnson, Joseph Albers, or any work by the Indian Space painters or members of the Abstract Artists Association? |
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Jackson Pollock's influence was indirect, but profound, since scores of painters adopted his painting technique of working with unstretched canvas on the floor. By 1959—60, the Second Generation appeared derivative and fell out of favor. I think many of those so-called Second Generation artists were first rate but were shortchanged; they were judged more for who influenced them and classified by which year their work was made than how good their work was. | Everyone is influenced, so what is the big deal? Pollock and Gorky were influenced by both Miro, and Picasso; de Kooning was influenced by Gorky; Miro was influenced by Picasso, and Picasso was influenced by everything he could possibly use. Gertrude Stein wrote of Picasso, "Genius is knowing who to be influenced by." What exactly defines the difference between being derivative and being influenced is an interesting question that isn't addressed by the Whitney. |
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Larry Rivers by including commercial imagery in his paintings is also considered to be a precursor to Pop Art. Helen Frankenthaler developed her own original style by staining fluid paint into raw canvas as did Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland after having been influenced by Jackson Pollock. Sam Francis developed his original style out of an Abstract Expressionist manner, reminiscent of Hofmann and de Kooning. | Grace Hartigan's work changed in the sixties as she added subject matter to her paintings, while Joan Mitchell to her credit stuck to her guns and produced her best work in the eighties. Alfred Leslie by the mid-sixties abandoned abstraction altogether for realism. His black and white, larger than life portraits might have served as influences on the portraits of Chuck Close in the late sixties. The recent rehabilitation of many Second Generation artists is long overdue. |
| Unfortunately, the Whitney Museum fails to clearly define the development and the relationship between American art of the fifties with American art of the sixties. |
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Where are the 1950s and 1960s paintings of Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ray Parker, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, Ron Davis, Gene Davis, Neil Williams, Larry Zox, Friedel Dzubas, Al Held, Burgoyne Diller, John Mclaughlin, Alfred Jensen, Jack Bush, Jack Youngerman, Walter Darby Bannard, David Simpson, Ralph Humphrey, Myron Stout, Budd Hopkins, Leon Polk Smith, Ludwig Sander, Nicholas Krushenick, Tom Holland, Alma Thomas, Paul Feeley, Thomas Downing, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kaufman, Nassos Daphnis, Paul Jenkins, Charles Hinman, Sven Lukin, Knox Martin, Albert Stadler, Edward Avedisian, or dozens of others? |
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Smith's work of the sixties bore close relationship to the paintings of his younger friends Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and Smith's work influenced the work of Sir Anthony Caro as well as a new generation of American and English sculptors. The clean shapes and lines of the Cubi series transcended any residue of Abstract Expressionism and prefigured the direction that abstract sculpture took in the hands of the younger generation. But there is no trace of either Smith's later work or the work of the younger Americans. |
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| Where is Milton Avery, Marisol, Jan M¸ller, George McNeil, Will Barnet, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, James Weeks, Paul Wonner, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine, Elaine de Kooning, Robert de Niro Sr., Louisa Matthiasdottir, Leland Bell, Wolf Kahn, Alfred Leslie, Charles Cajori, Graham Nickson, Irving Petlin, Mercedes Matter, Marcia Marcus, Chaim Gross, Leonard Baskin, Paul Resika, Susan Crile, Ann McCoy, Red Grooms, Audrey Flack, Janet Fish, Robert Beauchamp, Jay Milder, William Bailey, John Clem Clarke, Lennart Anderson, Jack Beal, Paul Georges, Robert Barnes, James McGarrell, or Neil Welliver? | On the fourth floor there are a few other figurative artists including: Philip Pearlstein, another Alex Katz, Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close and lots of Pop Art. According to the Whitney, Neil Jenney, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Philip Guston, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, along with a few other Neo-Expressionists in the seventies are the so-called rescuers of figure painting who brought it back to life, a fiction reserved for the exhibition's third floor. |
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Theater
of the Ridiculous
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Other works include a John Chamberlain sculpture, sexy photographs by Carolee Schneeman, two Bruce Conner pieces, a Lee Bontecou on the wall, a Cy Twombly, five Ray Johnson collages, a Wallace Berman, an Edward Kienholz, three mixed media works by Jess, a sculpture by Frederick Keisler, photographs by Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Roy DeCarava, and three Romare Bearden collages. It is surprising how minor and uninteresting most of this work looks. It's also surprising not to see Joseph Cornell's collage boxes in this context, but then this is the world according to the Whitney. |
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Minimalism is presented with cold, colorless, black, white, or gray paintings and sculptures by the usual suspects: Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Tuttle, Robert Irwin, a red Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, Jo Baer, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, a blue John McCracken, Louise Nevelson, and a wall drawing by Sol Lewitt. Post-Minimalists' works (the school of Joseph Beuys) include tame, cute, dreary, giddy and listless pieces by Bruce Nauman, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, Barry Le VA, Linda Benglis, William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, and some not so cute pieces by Louise Bourgeois (whose works are more appropriate in this context), Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucas Samaras, and an intense piece by Eva Hesse. |
| Missing is Alan Saret whose wire sculptures should have been included. There are interesting photographs by Diane Arbus, Danny Lyon, and Garry Winogrand. Ironically, work that emanated from mostly American roots is left out of the fourth floor and from the remainder of the exhibition, with only few exceptions. The fourth floor contains the most glaring omissions of important American painting and sculpture and the Whitney Museum's most egregious acts of self-censorship, suppressions and affronts to American art and to American artists I've ever seen — making this exhibition a ludicrous travesty. |
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In what I consider to be the strongest mainstream of American art, continuing the powerful tradition that emanated directly from American artists like David Smith, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, and others, American artists created painting and sculpture that explored and expanded the vocabulary and boundaries of visual expression. Unfortunately, the Whitney Museum doesn't show many works after the mid-sixties that issued from this direction. |
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Many of them struggled to address social and political issues exclusively, describing through signs, symbols, and process, their conceptions of anti-art and anti-form, in a detached, impersonal and often ironic way. Disregarding convention and tradition many Minimalists and Post-Minimalists embraced the notion of shock as an end in itself. Most of the work featured in this exhibition is reflective of politically oriented art emanating from Europe since the early sixties. Starting with Pop Art, and its antecedents, most American art showcased at the Whitney Museum are works with literal content that address only one side of the so-called critical, intellectual dialectic. |
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The
Deluge
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| The Whitney Museum would have done well had it shown at least some of the other mainstreams of American art in depth. |
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| Important sculptors like Larry Bell, Robert Hudson, Beverly Pepper, Peter Reginato, Ann Truitt, Alexander Liberman, Christopher Wilmarth, Michael Steiner, Robert Murray, Robert Grosvenor, Stephen Antonakas, Willard Boepple, James Wolfe, Guy Dill, Forrest Myers, Peter Forakis, Mel Kendrik, Sylvia Stone, Michael Todd, Joel Perlman, Ronald Bladen, Isaac Witkin, and dozens of others are missing. |
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But Their refusal to even recognize many of these artists goes far beyond just this show or just this museum. This is not a dismissal of failed directions; it is a massive cover-up. Serious, insidious, and egregious acts of re-writing art history, self-censorship, and suppression currently infect most of our art institutions. This project of revising art history is on a big scale. I can't say why all this censorship is taking place, although its been going on for decades. |
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The Whitney Museum's view is cranky, ignorant, narrow, inaccurate, annoying and seems patently ridiculous to me. Their claim is that only a handful of abstract painters and sculptors working in the sixties were notable, and they were all Minimalists and this is stupid. The refusal to recognize and acknowledge living artists whose works are being made today (many of whose works are in the Whitney Museum's own collection) verges on the criminally insane. | The Whitney Museum curators claim that it took some courageous mavericks in the seventies to reinvigorate painting; are they kidding? Painting never stopped being vigorous, except to those close-minded bigots and their blind hatred of Clement Greenberg. To acknowledge the truth, these people first need to learn how to see. The art establishment's blind prejudice against anything outside its own narrow range of sanctioned art has disenfranchised America's best artists. |
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The best of American painters and sculptors, both abstract and representational, exist today in a disconnected underground. They're paying terrible consequences in an uphill struggle for recognition while inadvertently creating a new, genuine avant-garde. |
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All art should be seen for its merits. Once again the museum treads a narrow trail showcasing artists that were newsworthy once upon a time and who tend to show in a small coterie of selected salon galleries. Here there are works to read, watch on television, or to examine via photo documentation. I don't object to this work, although some of the conceptual art seems tired. I do object to the physical condition of the yellow in Elizabeth Murray's painting Children Meeting (1978), because it badly needs conservation. Frankly, I'm more interested in expressive, felt, visual art than idea art, and, when I encounter idea art en masse, as in this show, I am offended by the pushing of so-called cerebral art at the expense of first-rate, visual art. |
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Perhaps this exhibition reflects twenty percent of an esoteric view of the art world according to Artforum, but what a waste of valuable time, energy, and resource, and what a shame. What is the Whitney Museum thinking? The exhibition is filled with false assumptions, hypocrisy, erroneous history, bad taste, foolish choices, and worst of all, the Brooklyn Museum brouhaha stole all the thunder. What a shame for the poor Whitney Museum; they have created a laughable and awful show and no one seems to care anymore. |
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©
Ronnie Landfield, NYC, October 1999
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| After the Flood |
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1. It is troubling when individual works or entire movements are hidden from public view (in some cases for decades), accompanied by denials or implied denials, or by indifference, of the existence of those works; and assertions that imply those works don't exist. Curators have the right to show or to not show whatever they choose, I would defend their freedom to do so, however do they have the right to suppress and censor and deny the existence of works in their institutions? |
Currently the official story of avant-garde abstract painting and sculpture in America that is on view at the Whitney Museum, denies works of scores of artists that demonstrate that American painters and sculptors by the late sixties went beyond minimalism creating a new expressionism. By keeping works from the sixties and seventies hidden from public scrutiny the museums are telling a big lie, and they appear to be selling a big lie as well. What are the museums afraid of? During the sixties, and seventies, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, and others were continuing to make paintings in their expressive painting styles. |
| During the same period younger painters such as Frank Stella, Ron Davis, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, Friedel Dzubas, Kenneth Noland, Brice Marden, Dan Christensen, Darby Bannard, Peter Young, Joan Snyder, Alan Cote, David Novros, William Pettet, Ralph Humphrey, Lawrence Stafford, Edward Avedisian, Larry Zox, Michael Goldberg, Pat Lipsky, myself, and dozens of others were developing their painting styles. Robert Murray, Ronald Bladen, Ann Truitt, Beverly Pepper, Robert Hudson, Larry Bell, Alexander Liberman, Robert Grosvenor, Forrest Myers, Michael Steiner, Peter Reginato, Marisol, Manuel Neri, Joel Perlman, Willard Boepple, James Wolfe, and dozens of others were by the late sixties-early seventies making important and expressive sculpture in a variety of styles. | Robert Beauchamp, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, and George McNeil, to name only a few examples of figurative painters who were also active at the time. Commercial success was used as a weapon against this work, popularity or potential popularity with the public being a sign of artistic unimportance. Erroneous charges cited against much of this work was that success with the public supposedly proved that works were crowd pleasing, decorative and unchallenging. Some artists appeared to be influenced by others and their work was dismissed. As a consequence of decades of censorship and suppression artists now face a terrible and unprecedented uphill struggle for recognition. |
| The Minimalists are presented as being among the few making cutting-edge abstract paintings in the sixties and seventies. The official story that the Europeans: German, Italian and French painters in the late sixties, early seventies, rebelled against American Minimalism and produced Neo-Expressionism, influencing American painting in the late seventies is clearly false. It is not surprising that the often shown, derivative and multi-influenced: Minimalists, Post-Minimalists, Neo-Expressionists, Neo-Geoist's, Post-Modernists and other currently showcased movements herald their commercial success as a sign of value and importance. Hypocritically, these works are celebrated today because they are crowd pleasing and commercially successful. Ironically many young American cutting-edge painters notably Dan Christensen, Peter Young, William Pettet, Ron Davis, Lawrence Stafford, Larry Poons, Alan Cote, myself and many others sent their expressive, painterly paintings to Germany and other parts of Europe during the late sixties and early seventies. |
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2.
Root, hog or die, means to stand rooted, hog as much territory as
possible and fight to the death. In the art world it means establish
your position and gain control in the media, and important exhibition
spaces; hog the attention, and make sure what is shown is only what
you choose to show; and defend your position to the end. The Sensation
exhibition currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, produced by Charles
Saatchi, is a good example of "Root, hog or die."
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3.
Lisa Phillips, The American Century, Art and Culture, 1950-2000,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with W.W.
Norton and Company, New York, London, 1999.
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4.
Carol Vogel, Inside Art, New York Times, October 1, 1999, p. E33.
Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and
Other Works, edited by Francis V. O'Conner and Eugene V. Thaw,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. Jackson Pollock,
volume 2, Paintings, 1948-1955, catalogue numbers 186-382. (Cat. #271)
Number 27, 1950, Oil on Canvas, 49 x 106 in., signed and dated
lower right "Jackson Pollock 50," Collection: Whitney Museum
of American Art (purchase, 1953). Exhibitions: Parsons, hung vertically,
top to right, despite signature and date. See (vol. 4, chr. fig. 58.)
References: "American Fashion: The New Soft Look" Vogue,
March 1, 1951, (reproduced vertically top to right with fashion model
standing in front of canvas). Caption, Vol. 4, p. 254, fig. 58, 59.
Installation of Parsons 1950, showing paintings by Pollock before
he stretched them.
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| The East Village Eye, October, 1983, published Mike Bidlo's observation that Pollock hung Number, 27, 1950 vertically in his 1950 Parsons show. He cited the Pollock catalogue raisonnČ by O'Conner and Thaw as his source. |
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5.
Lisa Phillips, The American Century, Art and Culture, 1950-2000,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with W.W.
Norton and Company, New York, London, 1999.p. 42.
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The
Whitney Museum Ends The American Century Ronnie Landfield © 1999 All Rights Reserved. |
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