Word: showing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glory, and costumes ranging from fringed buckskin to China Machado chic. "Peace Now" buttons blossomed on satin evening gowns. Pamphlets denouncing David Rockefeller, Viet Nam and the art market were dispensed along with cocktails and tiny sandwiches. Outside, pickets protested the lack of black and women artists in the show. Manhattan's venerable Metropolitan Museum had never before been host to anything quite like it, a fact that was duly lamented by diehard traditionalists. The occasion? The Met's 100th birthday. With the opening last week of its first centennial exhibition, the museum seemed to be deGlaring that...
Gone were the velvet mounts, the El 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...
...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...
Allowing for a bit of hyperbole, that much is clear from the show itself. Except for a few minimal sculptures, Pop brings Geldzahler's show to an abrupt end and, surprisingly, it takes its place comfortably enough as history. What has happened since 1965, the cutoff date Geldzahler chose for established talents, would be another show entirely, a free-for-all with kinetic and light sculptures, environments, photo-realists and cold figuratists, the shadowy, sensitive light works of Los Angeles artists, the foolish funny funk art of San Franciscans, and the esoteric conceptual fantasies of the young reactionaries...
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...