Word: hirshhorn
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...will they? The 1981 Whitney Biennial has now arrived, along with a whole season of roundups, "direction" shows and the like. East of the Appalachians, two other major ones are running: in New York, the Guggenheim's "19 Artists-Emergent Americans," and in Washington, the Hirshhorn Museum's "Directions 1981." Among them, these three sample the work of some 150 painters, sculptors, land artists, photographers, video and film makers. Some of the artists, like Richard Diebenkora, Harry Callahan or Ellsworth Kelly, are very well known and represented by first-class work. Others, like Willem de Kooning, are equally...
...main ones here? To begin with, realist painting-but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim is by the oldest of the "emergent" artists, the 63-year-old West Coast movie critic and former abstractionist Manny Farber. His still lifes of labels, dolls...
Recent decorative tendencies in American art are sampled at the Whitney but ignored in both the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn. The idea of an art, abstract or figurative, that is entirely hedonistic, anxiety-free and without social resonance is not, of course, new in America. That was what most abstract painting in the '60s was about, although the fact was concealed as embarrassing. Now the impulse is out of the closet, which is a relief-although it seems not to have produced any genuinely major painting. The best of the peintre-décorateurs, and the longest...
...carpeting to the city but also presenting thousands of nights of first-class opera, theater and ballet. The National Symphony is now led by Mstislav Rostropovich and is magnificent. There are other great institutions: the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian museums, the National Theater, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden - all intelligently run, all national showpieces. Nor is the feeling of these places monumental and distant. One of the white blades of the National Gallery's East Building is tinged brown about three feet up from the grass, where kids could not resist grasping...
...Maurice Tuchman of LACMA -decided to use material only from Western collections. But it is admirably precise in historical judgment and informed as to selection; and, strange to say, it is the first show of its kind in America. After closing at LACMA, it will be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in late fall...