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Thinking Big
John Haberin New York City
Epic Abstraction and Morris Louis: Veils
Oh, for the days when giants walked the earth, leaving now and then the mark of their presence in paint. Oh, for the days of art before irony, small-bore politics, and personal confessions. Oh, for the days of "Epic Abstraction."
I am (mostly) kidding, but the Met (mostly) is not. merely updates it halfheartedly for the present. In fact, it takes Abstract Expressionism as a "jumping-off point" to contemporary art, without quite knowing where to land. It bows to contemporary views of art, with room for more than dead white males, and it bows to recent art as well with strategic pairings. It also allows a glimpse of present-day curatorial practices with recent loans, purchases, and gifts. An epic, it argues, needs time to complete its recital, assuming that it ever will—and a postscript follows one artist in the show, Morris Louis, as he finds his devotion to color in stepping out from behind the Veils. 
A world in shambles
One day, the Met will get around to renovating its rooms for modern and contemporary art—with luck while it can still display that art in the Met Breuer. (Given the politics of museum expansions, that is by no means a certainty.) For now, the Lila Acheson Wallace wing will have to do as it stands. Its first two rooms are large enough for epic painting and intimate enough for drawings, with surveys in miniature of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. They open onto cross-sections of Abstract Expressionist New York and then color-field painting, including Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell. And then the space opens up and things get really epic.
The selection has no shortage of existential drama—and the museum declares as much in its opening wall text, with a quote from Barnett Newman. "We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war." Later on, Clyfford Still weighs in as well. "These are not paintings in the usual sense," he wrote. "They are life and death merging in fearful union." Art here is a matter of life and death.
So much so, in fact, that it makes room for more lives and more deaths, beyond New York and North America, and not all of them are epic. Japan felt the fierceness of war, too, in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Jackson Pollock shares that first room with Kazuo Shiraga of Gutai, the Japanese collective. Working in 1958, Shiraga smears mud brown into blood red over acid purple and rust yellow, with his bare hands and feet. Sure enough, a late Pollock across the room has his foot prints as well, along with terse drips and tense echoes of a human head beyond anything that Gutai imagined. Soon enough, echoes of traditional calligraphy by Inoue Yuichi will introduce Franz Kline in Black, White, and Gray and the totemic blacks of Robert Motherwell, with an Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Yayoi Kusama from Japan will turn up before things are done.
As with Kusama, the opening to other lives extends to women. They number Hedda Sterne, who posed among male "action painters" for a famous photograph of "the irascibles." (Her echoes of machinery are more fussy than epic or distinctive, but worth the acquaintance.) Most rooms also center on a single sculpture, including work by Barbara Hepworth, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Truitt. Nevelson's mammoth black enclosure, only rarely on view, could well sum up her career—from each of its sculpted sides to glass tiles covering a dark interior that no one but she will ever enter. Alma Thomas precedes other black artists, including Thornton Dial and Frank Bowling, while Carmen Herrera, though hardly at her best, brings Minimalism up to date for 2012.
Not that the Met trashes a conventional history or the need for history itself. It makes the point in that opening text. "So we actually began," Newman continued, "as if painting were not only dead but had never existed." Yet the curator, Randall Griffey, quickly pounces on the idea of a tabula rasa, or blank slate. He connects the movement's mythic themes to Surrealism in Europe and global interchange. The idea that art cannot start from scratch also motivates the inclusion here and there of younger artists, like Mark Bradford and Chakaia Booker.
Abstract Expressionism has suffered plenty of trashing—from the cooler stance of Andy Warhol and Pop Art to a refusal of gesture in Minimalism or conceptual art. Feminism and the brutal irony of the "Pictures generation" had their refusals as well. The Met, though, is perfectly O.K. with bigness. Easter Monday by Willem de Kooning, it boasts, is the largest painting that he exhibited in 1956, and Nevelson's Mrs. N's Palace is her largest work ever. The museum welcomes macho in art after World War II. It just extends the welcome and the macho to women.
Continuity and disruption
"Epic Abstraction" is all about that interplay between continuity and disruption, and art today is still looking back and asking for more. It plays out in three stages, starting with Pollock and Rothko. Pollock's trio of paintings sums up the course of his epic abstractions—from the myth making in Pasiphaë in 1943 to the fullness of drip painting in Autumn Rhythm in 1950 and finally the stripping back to black enamel on bare canvas in 1952. (He has another drip painting two rooms later.) Rothko's floating rectangles take shape from irregular stains to intense colors and finally an approach to black. Yet the Met also displays their early sketches, including Pollock's Psychoanalytic Drawing, for their roots in Surrealism and a Surrealism beyond borders.
Works on paper vanish from that point on, but one can hardly miss them amid so much else. Stage two comes after the 1950s, where you might never expect it. It restricts Morris Louis in 1961 and Bridget Riley in 1973 to vertical stripes—and Newman himself to just two blue "zips" on white. (The slim white verticals between them and to their left thus function as zips as well.) The selection brings color-field painting and Op Art closer to Minimalism, not unlike Larry Zox. At the same time, it makes the case for Minimalism as epic abstraction. When Louis hangs his stripes upside-down, so paint drips out toward the top, he recalls Pollock's canvas on the move from floor to walls.
The creative interplay with history continues with Mitchell at her largest and sparest—or with Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle at their most compact, dark, and dense. With its motor deactivated, his machine from 1961 will never self-destruct. Dial indeed appeared in the very same wing just months before, in a show called "History Refuses to Die." Like Dial's shredded cotton, Bowling's map of the world, from Africa to South America, evokes the slave trade. With stage three, continuity takes in the new millennium. Bradford has a credible version of Abstract Expressionism in a diptych of rags, while Booker has a credible response to David Smith in used tires.
With two loans from artist foundations and two from private collectors, the Met hopes to bridge another divide—between temporary exhibition and the permanent collection. (Will those four loans enter the collection? Time will tell.) With around fifty works, it may not even sound so epic. Does the world, though, really need another temporary exhibition like this one, and is its mild revisionism anywhere near enough?
AbEx, like most of its artists, has had more than one retrospective in recent years, and I have already had my say on them all. Still other shows have tackled diversity in abstract art, much like this one. They have surveyed Gutai, Latin America, African American art, and women artists. Even a show of "Art in the Age of Black Power" in Brooklyn ended with a floor for abstraction. Then, too, in spanning more than sixty years, what could the Met not have included? When have artists stopped thinking big?
Any show with Elizabeth Murray could easily have found space for Frank Stella. Should it include the spare radiance of fluorescent light for Dan Flavin? Actually, his very first tube hangs right outside, like a diagonal zip. While not in the show, Sol LeWitt holds a huge wall a floor below. Then again, when it comes to continuity and breakthroughs, incoherence may be the point. The show ends on a balcony overlooking more of the collection, including a large painting by Al Held and a large sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky. The epic recital continues, with or without the Met, and the dream of a new beginning refuses to die.
Behind the veil
What lies behind the veil? Canvas, of course, and Morris Louis leaves plenty of it exposed to light. It was essential to his technique, of pouring layers of translucent color onto unprimed, unstretched cotton duck, and one example retains a gap that he never got around to filling. These are mural-scaled paintings, where fabric itself is the mural. One can imagine its novelty, amid the triumph of "all-over painting." Color surrounds even the floating rectangles of Mark Rothko.
Still, one may not have time to appreciate the empty space, not when there is so much resplendent color. Up close to his Veils, pigment sparkles in Magna, the acrylic resin made specially for him. Step back and it darkens, as overlapping layers intercept the light. Colors shift from point to point across the surface, so that even from a distance they offer an immersive experience, as they were for him. Color also gains mass, anchored to the bottom edge of the canvas. The veils broaden at the top, in the direction of the pour, like gigantic mushrooms.
Not that he intended the image, although this was 1958 into 1959, when the word mushroom went with clouds, and school kids were hiding under their desks. Yet Louis was quite comfortable with metaphor, even in the heyday of "pure painting." He and Kenneth Noland got the idea of stains from Helen Frankenthaler, especially from her 1952 Mountains and Sea. The titles in his own series allude to veils and curtains, along with Grotto and Dawn, much as Alma Thomas (also in Washington, D.C.) alluded to flowers and trees. Did he think of canvas as a stage for the act of poured paint? What would one see if one could draw aside the veil?
Maybe canvas, or maybe nothing—nothing beyond the veil itself. Look up to the very edge, for what might peek out from behind, and one sees more color. Color is his real subject, and it is startling. Those deep blues, greens, purples, and browns began as light, unmixed colors, like bright orange. Veils may sound flimsy, and color-field painting has had to battle a reputation as lightweight compared to Abstract Expressionism before it and Minimalism to come, but these are not like the physical curtains that often heighten the illusion in trompe l'oeil painting. They are the thing itself.
Frankenthaler was turning to acrylic as well, in relatively small paintings from 1962 and 1963. A nearby gallery focuses on the turn, and there, too, one sees plenty of canvas. If the work looks downright sketchy after Louis, she, too, conflated object and process. Her color was also gathering mass, as the fields nestle, jostle, and overlap. She now draws only with color, reaching more and more to the edge. These are perhaps her purest but also weakest abstractions, before a sensation of landscape returns in her finer work, but then remember the date.
They were not alone in demanding that painting become itself at last. Frank Stella was about to undertake his first "Black Paintings," and the ultimate in black paintings from Reinhardt and Jake Berthot were on their way. Canvas takes center stage for Louis in his later Unfurleds, but there, too, color defines image and object, pouring in from each side. Painting as material object took on a personal meaning as well. Notice the colorless stains, in resin and solvent that spread beyond the veil? One had better, for they contributed to his death from lung cancer in 1962, at age fifty.
"Epic Abstraction" tsn pened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 4, 2020, Morris Louis at Mnuchin and Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian on Madison Avenue through October 18, 2014. Related reviews with links here look at most of the same artists, movements, and diversity.