Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1963.
No show has ever had me so eager to get at it as the "AbExNY: The Big Picture" show at MoMA and, while I don't want to say I was disappointed, you-the-reader have read enough to know that this is exactly what I am going to say, so, indulge me in a series of caveats, a minor bid to raise your own anticipation, before I come clean with it.
In the first place, "disappointed" doesn't exactly do justice to this survey. The incredible works from the Abstract Expressionist era represented in MoMA's collection resist that sort of entreaty from mere mortals. Viewers don't get to be disappointed in the Ab-Ex that MoMA can muster. Nobody can do this survey better than MoMA and yet, well.
"Big Picture" is a just survey of the Abstract Expressionist period, despite the survey's several outstanding flaws, including specifically the omission of Clyfford Still (ably examined by Tyler Green) and the inclusion of Philip Guston, whose flirtations with Ab-Ex brush stroke, while quite handsome, are no more important to Guston's career or Abstract Expressionism's development than Guston's Works Progress Administration paintings say much about the WPA. You could say that the abstractions that precede Guston's mature, comic style illustrate the ubiquity of Ab-Ex language in painting at the time. You could, but MoMA does not.
Then there is the overestimation of the era's forefather (Gorky), winners (Pollock and Rothko; Motherwell, Newman, Reinhardt), and also-rans (Still, Gottlieb, all the women). The exhibit is hung to reinforce the hierarchical presentation of Abstract Expressionism that anyone who has taken a college-level survey of modern art knows by heart. This is an installation of the museum's permanent collection and not an argument, looking back, about the things that MoMA and the rest of us missed about the period. Certain constraints built into the show foreclose the possibility of a real re-examination: It's Ab-Ex from New York that MoMA happened to have acquired, so it is of course rule bound to a certain extent to reinforce the prevailing mythology of Abstract Expressionism—Albert Barr being, after all, one of its foremost curatorial oracles.
Yet there are glimpses throughout of the college art history course that might have been: Lee Krasner's Untitled (1949) is one of the gems of MoMA's Ab-Ex collection, and of the era period—and yet it is not one of the gems of this show, or not put forward as one, anyway. So it's not wrong that Gorky devised a visual vocabulary that Pollock and Rothko would elevate to great heights, but it goes unexamined by MoMA the degree to which MoMA itself made this a reality. Fifty or sixty years later, MoMA is still giving viewers the official line.
In hindsight it is easy to quibble with MoMA's installation but hard to argue with it. The rooms devoted to Newman, Reinhardt, and Motherwell would speak for themselves. But here is the chief disappointment of "The Big Picture": They do not. Man but is it a hard show to get into.
From the start is the awkward greatest-hits gallery adjacent to the Ab-Ex exhibit, where MoMA has crowded seminal Warhol and Jasper Johns paintings. What a meaningless, meaningful jumble of paintings that is. My working theory is that MoMA hung the gallery as a honey trap or a release valve, some way to collect and concentrate tourists preening for iPhone pictures. Something to give "The Big Picture" a little bit of breathing room.
Because Abstract Expressionist paintings are supposed to be transportive, to be "intimate and human," as Rothko put it in 1951, back when he felt the need to defend his instinct to paint very large pictures—right? Yet MoMA lets the air out of every single one. For reasons I couldn't totally appreciate or even detect until I'd left the exhibit, the new MoMA is just too clinical to withstand a look the works that made the museum. This is the exhibit that shows MoMA at its core, pride and prejudices alike, but it's also the show that reveals the failure of the new museum.
