I’m Talking Whitney Here.

Nice day on Saturday so I chose to spend a few hours at the Whitney Museum looking at everything that they have up right now, which exhausted me. The Whitney has always struck me as being like a small town, compared to those other big city houses of art. I don’t mean it in a bad way, but this is a place where the ticket seller tells me what an honor it must be for me to be in their permanent collection as he takes my "artist in the collection lifetime" membership pass and hands me my ticket, and where the female coat checker asks as she hands me my coat if I enjoyed the shows. Hard to see this happening at the Moma or The Met or The Gu Mu. After all this is a museum that I recall visiting as a kid in the early 50’s when it was on 54th st. and that you could get to by going through a connecting entrance in the Moma. For years I thought I had dreamed or imagined this “magic door”. The Whitney is now getting ready to move into a giant new building downtown designed by Renzo Piano who also did the very fine recent renovations on the Morgan Library so I’m expecting a good looking building unlike the Moma mess designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, and no doubt the museum will lose its small town feel once they open to the public in 2015. My main stop today was the well received and talked up Jay DeFeo Retrospective and her giant (in size and reputation) “painting” “The Rose” that she worked on for about 8 years and is built up of paint and more paint that she then chiseled and carved. Actually I find the story of the piece more interesting than the final result, but it is a striking and dramatic work lit with theatrical wow and style, but for me hardly one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century. There’s much to like in this colorless show, and much that left me cold or rather lukewarm. Her delicate drawings and gentle collages are really not my cup of tea, and I was more drawn (no pun please) to her craggy dense large textured paintings. The exhibit is beautifully installed, and I do recommend that it be seen even though I have my own private reservations about her work. She remained somewhat obscure and unknown until this show so I guess that there are indeed 2nd and even 3rd acts in the art world, which is a good thing. Also saw the “Sinister Pop” show which is about as sinister as a day at the beach. There are many terrific pieces in the show all from the Museum’s collection and like the other group show “Blues For Smoke” on view it’s a hit and miss exhibit. Although basically a show highlighting the African American experience in art and music there is also a hefty use of video and film throughout and includes several white artists that I found puzzling and unnecessary but I guess the curator’s thinking was that even white folks can get the blues. As I said, its an uneven show with some works that are minor and not very interesting and I was drawn more to the works by the “older” generation of artists like the marvelous paintings by Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, the collages of Romare Bearden and the Roy DeCarava photographs. The installation is also unappealing and dull. The really wonderful show for me is the “American Legends: From Calder to O’Keefe which is a changing installation and takes up the entire 5th floor and is just wonderful. There are rooms devoted to Stuart Davis, Joseph Stella, Demuth, Elie Nadelman, (who when i was a kid thought he was a woman) Calder, Hopper, Cornell, Jacob Lawrence, O’Keefe, Marsh, Hartley and other fine artists from the first half of the 20th Century and includes for me a revelation room featuring the photographs and some paintings by Ralston Crawford.

 

images Joseph Stella and  Jay DeFeo