Exhibit of the week: Abstract Expressionist New York

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through April 25, 2011

“Scarred by war, schooled in surrealism, hip to psychotherapy,” the painters known as the abstract expressionists took the art world by storm in the 1950s, said Barbara Hoffman in the New York Post. A tightknit crowd of mostly men, they gathered regularly at Manhattan’s Cedar Tavern to drink heavily and discuss “new ways to make art.” Many were geniuses: Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko soon “made New York the center of the art world, and the Museum of Modern Art its capitol.” Indeed, MoMA acquired so many major paintings by these artists that it was able to mount this authoritative consideration of the movement using works exclusively from its own collection. The result is “a vibrant, energizing” exhibit that’s “far more than a greatest hits collection.”

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The crowding together of so much great work adds a special dimension, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The shows’s 100 paintings create an atmosphere in which ideas seem to ricochet from one canvas to another. “Hours can be spent” in the single room where six early Pollocks hang beside early canvases from Rothko, Philip Guston, Richard Pousette-Dart, and others. “Pollock chews up the scenery at every turn,” foreshadowing his eventual emergence as the movement’s foremost painter. His most important works are given a gallery of their own, as are eight “radiantly colored” Rothkos. De Kooning receives short shrift, since MoMA has always had a woeful collection of his work. Otherwise, “what’s not to like?”

What’s missing most is the true flavor of the original scene, said Jed Perl in The New Republic. A visitor who’s never seen this “blue-chip stuff” will surely relish the chance to study a work like Newman’s “vehemently rhapsodic” Vir Heroicus Sublimis. But the show as a whole too often makes the ab-ex movement seem less like a conversation than a competition between egos. A couple of smaller, related exhibits downstairs catch some of the “crazy-quilt multiplicity” of New York’s art world, but this supposed celebration of abstract expressionism offers viewers “not paintings but MoMA logos.” It’s a show that’s “three-quarters brain-dead.”