Word: showing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American Century," part one of which opened two weeks ago in New York City, is the biggest curatorial effort by the Whitney Museum of American Art in a long, long while--an ambitious and, for the most part, rewarding show. Its aim is to narrate the story of American art (mostly painting and photography, but some sculpture, design and architecture) over the past 100 years and to make sense--brief sense, inevitably--of the relations between that art and the changing society around...
This first installment (on view through Aug. 22) takes us from 1900 to 1950, and the second (to open Sept. 26) will see the story through to the century's end. The show's curator is Barbara Haskell, the only reputable art historian the embattled Whitney had left on its staff when the scheme was launched three years ago, and she has produced a serviceable and often illuminating catalog, reinforced by scores of sidebars on dance, music, film and dozens of other subjects not amenable to gallery treatment, written by no fewer than 22 other contributors. Practically nowhere does this...
...Japanese imperialism overrunning the world. Today its premise is expiring, with loud bangs and many whimpers, in a liar's presidency and on the ghastly fields of the former Yugoslavia. But it's almost impossible to exaggerate how deeply Americans felt this destiny in the period covered by this show, roughly from the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt to the outbreak of the cold war. And they had reason to believe...
...obsessive promotion of AbEx as the great American moment, the arrival of sudden maturity, is waning now (How could anyone keep it up?), but it has a slightly weird consequence for this show. The older works--the ones from the teens, '20s and '30s--look fresher than the younger ones. We are used to seeing endless reproductions of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko--but not of Elie Nadelman, Arthur Dove or Joseph Stella. Because of this contrast, the top two floors of the show--it starts at the top and, taking advantage of gravity, goes downward--seem more interesting than...
...show is a straightforward trot through art and social history, aimed directly at a general, nonspecialist public--the kind of public the Whitney needs to reach if it is to recover from its long doldrums. Much is riding on the show's success or failure. Because it was underwritten by Intel, a great song and dance is made about the marvels of the websites and of getting people wired into art history. But it's the actual works of art, not their teensy digital clones, that count...