Word: expressionistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What is perhaps most notable about the current Fogg exhibition of works from the Abstract Expressionist period is simply its presence in the museum which seems hard-pressed to give much attention to the existence of modern art. The Fogg has presented several temporary shows of modern art in recent years, but the museum keeps its permanent collection of twentieth century work largely away from the public gaze in libraries, offices and storerooms...
Also featured are a light, airy-hued canvas by Philip Guston--a lesser abstract expressionist but a very good work of his and William Baziotes' "Bird of Paradise" executed in 1947. Ad Reinhardt also manages to slip into the show with an untitled work done...
...show is not a truly representative sampling of abstract expressionism in that it does not contain some of the abstract expressionist works typically thought of with the school and because it includes a few artists who are not strictly abstract expressionists. The holes in the Fogg's collection of work from the period and the fact that the exhibit is designed in conjunction with a current Fine Arts department offering on the subject, may explain why this exhibit does not provide the public with a sampling of great and famous moments in abstract expressionism...
...experiences in Jungian analysis. This work which incorporates primitivesque figures and symbols reminds us that Pollock did not spend his entire artistic career dripping paint on canvas on his way to fame, fortune and artistic fulfillment. But even if "Figure" provides a good academic lesson, any show of abstract expressionist work is incomplete, as this one proves, without a mature Pollock to epitomize the nature and aims of the period--an expression of the unconscious through the emotional versus formalist use of color, line, paint and abstraction...
Although no finished Gorky paintings are in the show, his drawings and preliminary studies for other compositions are examples of the mature Gorky--the abstract expressionist whom Gorky eventually discovered in himself with the help of the Chileam surrealist Matta, after years of imitating the work of his contemporaries and past masters. The study for "Calendars", recently donated to the Fogg, is a very strong work which shows Gorky in one of his finer moments...