Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Today, at 62, Motherwell is an American master (one of the very few around), but that is a recent reputation. Through the '40s and '50s in New York, when he was the youngest of the original abstract expressionist group, his conscious Francophilia set him rather apart from his colleagues. It was often taken as a denial of American newness. as a manifesto of eclecticism. Other artists dissimulated their debts to French painting or let critics bury them. Not Motherwell. Thus he was much abused as a mock European, all taste and private income-a Dick Diver, not attuned...
...cubism by New York, which was itself, as the Dadaist Picabia remarked, "the only cubist town in the world." And so on to the surrealist artists who, sponsored by Peggy Guggenheim in the '30s and '40s, helped provoke the climactic movement of the early American avantgarde: abstract expressionism...
...other hand, the show treats such major artists as it does include quite inanely. The section dealing with abstract expressionism is feeble and disconnected. If one wanted, for instance, to demonstrate the European context of Jackson Pollock's drip-drawing, one would show the appropriate works by Masson and Ernst, not the empty doodle by Georges Mathieu that hangs next to Pollock's Number 32. The dismal efforts of French artists to turn their Dada heritage into American Pop are much in evidence. But it is one thing to dis inter the unmourned trivialities of people like Martial...
...course her friends call, too. For, though she has remarked of her reforming campaigns that "They are the only things that made my life interesting, that made me feel that I was a part of my times...," it is nevertheless apparent that it is people, rather than abstract political ideologies that she cares about...
...terraced nightclubs, the carmine-lipped girls with padded shoulders, the hokey production number with the star swiveling down an immense abstract staircase-they're all here. But why? Half the time Scorsese is sending them up, and the other half trying to cash them in at face value for a dividend of unearned nostalgia...