Word: metting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Met's first curator of contemporary arts, he is certainly the museum's most controversial acquisition in the last decade. No one in Manhattan's ingrown art world elicits such studied veneration or unquotable outrage. One reason is that Henry has taken on the almost incompatible tasks of scout and judge. As scout, he strives to keep abreast, mingling familiarly with the most avant of the avantgardists. Huffing and puffing up countless stairs to artists' studios by day, wining and dining with their patrons by night, he is equally at home in the scruffy lofts...