From the Brink, Something Grand

THERE were drag queens mingling with society matrons, rock 'n' roll blasting through the halls where Rembrandt and Velasquez once reigned in hushed glory, and costumes ranging from fringed buckskin to China Machado chic. "Peace Now" buttons blossomed on satin evening gowns. Pamphlets denouncing David Rockefeller, Viet Nam and the art market were dispensed along with cocktails and tiny sandwiches. Outside, pickets protested the lack of black and women artists in the show. Manhattan's venerable Metropolitan Museum had never before been host to anything quite like it, a fact that was duly lamented by diehard traditionalists. The occasion? The Met's 100th birthday. With the opening last week of its first centennial exhibition, the museum seemed to be deGlaring that it had no intention of getting any older.

Gone were the velvet mounts, the El Grecos and the Goyas, all removed to temporary quarters. In their place were white walls and gray carpeting. And for the first time in the museum's history, the moderns held center stage. The show, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," was organized by the Met's controversial curator of contemporary arts, Henry Geldzahler (see box, page 81). A gargantuan display spreading over 35 galleries, a space that would easily accommodate the entire Museum of Modern Art, it traces the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism through its later manifestations in hard-edged abstraction on to the violent reaction that coalesced in Pop art. Essentially, it is the story of American art's coming of age.

As history, the Met's show is selective and flawed. Geldzahler has limited his exhibition to what he calls the New York School, by his definition a stylistic rather than a geographic limitation, and focused on what he sees as the central figures in the international modernist tradition. Given this definition, however, it is hard to see why he left out such major artists as Naum Gabo, Louise Nevelson, Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, William Baziotes, Richard Lindner, Larry Rivers, Marisol and Lee Bontecou. Even so, with 406 works by 43 artists, Geldzahler has assembled the most exhaustive survey ever of the period.

Something special happened in Manhattan in the early 1940s. For one thing, many of Europe's most innovative artists sought refuge in New York during

World War II. From Holland came Piet Mondrian, from Germany Hans Hofmann and George Grosz, from France Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst, providing the new generation of U.S. artists with direct links to Cubism ana Surrealism.

Unencumbered by the luggage of tradition, and armed with that daring and brashness that is both the American virtue and vice, Jackson Pollock and others who followed him dispensed with the easel format, spread their canvases on the floor, and poured out tangled rhythms in loops and swirls of paint. What they accomplished was the destruction of form itself. "That liberation," says Japanese Critic Ichiro Hariu, "fired the imagination of artists around the world and touched off an artistic chain reaction." Adds Chicago Professor Franz Schulze: "Whether Abstract Expressionism was successful or not is less important than that it persuaded other American artists to make equally radical gestures--in light, Pop art, minimal, conceptual art--indeed everything that has followed."

Push-Pull Theory. Its variety, if not infinite, was impressive. Mark Rothko reduced his palette to the softest shades and his compositions to a pair of rectangles in tandem. That commanding teacher Hans Hofmann preached what he called the "push-pull" theory of colors in tension--and practiced it to perfection. De Kooning restored the name of action to artistic thought, slashing at his canvases with inspired passion. David Smith took the grand gesture to sculpture, mounting one stainless steel shaft upon another in marvels of cliff-hanger balance. Later artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella solidified and emboldened color and clipped its ragged edges, while Morris Louis thinned his paints to the consistency of water and sent them streaming over unprimed canvas in free-flow ing rainbows. Within silent, seemingly impenetrable monochromes, Ad Reinhardt discovered an invisible world.

For all its vivacity, energy and flair for exuberant gesture and radiant color, American art in the 1940s was already betraying a moody melancholy lurking beneath the aggressive romanticism. Ar shile Gorky's disembodied forms, drifting poignantly amid the lyric whisperings of nature, have a kind of indescribable horror, like cancer in a beautiful girl. Edward Hopper's Gas is everybody's home town -- and it is stifling with loneliness.

Joseph Cornell, in a rejection of the big, the bold, the conventionally beautiful, cultivated a secret garden of everyday artifacts. The melancholy strain resurfaces in George Segal's Gas Station and Andy Warhol's photomontage of an electric chair. Even in a painting like Barnett Newman's Anna's Light, for all the persuasive warmth in which it wraps the spectator, nothing can alter the fact that there is only emptiness on Newman's horizon.

Inevitable Reactions. By the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the new academicism. A million haphazard abstractions splashed from the hands of virtually every art student able to clasp a brush or wield a tube of paint. A reaction was inevitable, though no one dreamed its name would be Pop, its inspiration advertising and comic strips. To many, the antidote was distinctly more unpleasant than the malady. But there were moments of high humor and certainly social awareness. A rich, fat and powerful consumer society was rich, fat and powerful enough to accept its own image, no matter how ugly it turned out to be. Perhaps because the image was so powerful, the movement was unusually short-lived. A scant decade after its birth, Geldzahler observes: "It seems today that Pop art was an episode. In fact, just about everything new and original in Pop was stated by a few artists in the first years of its existence."

Allowing for a bit of hyperbole, that much is clear from the show itself. Except for a few minimal sculptures, Pop brings Geldzahler's show to an abrupt end and, surprisingly, it takes its place comfortably enough as history. What has happened since 1965, the cutoff date Geldzahler chose for established talents, would be another show entirely, a free-for-all with kinetic and light sculptures, environments, photo-realists and cold figuratists, the shadowy, sensitive light works of Los Angeles artists, the foolish funny funk art of San Franciscans, and the esoteric conceptual fantasies of the young reactionaries.

Serious Deficiency. For all its limitations, the show makes an eloquent statement about American art in recent years. Geldzahler's decision to devote whole rooms to single artists of his choice rather than include everybody results in a perspective that he himself probably did not anticipate. In the Met's vast spaces, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell and even Barnett Newman wither. But the works of Ad Reinhardt, Hans Hofmann and Helen Frankenthaler take on new authority. The show's most serious deficiency is in sculpture, and Geldzahler admits that, with the exception of David Smith's towering talent, his choices were geared to what would look well with the paintings.

For the young who have already bolted the establishment, the Metropolitan's show may represent another irrelevant exercise in self-aggrandizement for what goes in the marketplace. Peter Selz, director of Berkeley's University Art Museum, observes: "Today's young artists reject pure color paintings as establishment art. They are more interested in changing our total environment." Nonetheless, aside from the majestic scale, the frequent emptiness and the su-persimple icons of the past three decades, there is a lesson to be learned from the Met's show. It is that American artists have persistently practiced a kind of aesthetic brinkmanship in taking an idea to its logical, if sometimes totally irrational conclusion. As a result, their art achieved more than occasional grandeur. It was exciting even when it failed, providing a tradition that invites any young artist to try absolutely anything. Whether that is a good thing will not be clear until the Met is a few years into its second century.

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