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Affirming Pure Painting
| Article
# : |
18519 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,620 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
It's a commonplace to note these days that the tales of overnight celebrity and inflated prices for young, untested artists are sure signs of an art world which, to put it mildly, has a bizarre sense of priorities. Artists barely out of graduate school (assuming they ever went) are taken as seriously, both in the marketplace and in our institutions of culture, as artists of an earlier generation whose important contributions to the history of modern art have long been an established part of the historical record.
But there's another, perhaps less well-noted sense in which the American art world, particularly the one centered in New York, appears seriously misguided, and that is in the exhibition programs of the major museums not only in that city but on the entire East Coast. More and more, these institutions are allowing their exhibition calendars to be shaped by what is most appealing at the moment, relegating anything that isn't sufficiently "trendy" to the discard pile. The younger, newer, or hipper artists are, the more likely they are to be granted the coveted (although now somewhat devalued) museum retrospective. Never mind that their achievements are likely to be more slender--and certainly far more debatable--than those of an older and more established artist.
In other words, museums today are demonstrably reversing some of the long-held priorities that helped define their mission. Instead of concentrating on sifting the past, helping us to understand it and the values it offers, they are engaged in a frantic attempt to keep abreast of the present, with its transient, momentary passions and ongoing uncertainties. Consequently, there is a growing list of important artists and exhibitions that are simply not being seen in New York, still the key context in terms of the communal discussion that continuously shapes reputations.
Consider, for example, the case of Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955), the Russian-born member of the School of Paris, best known for his luminous, pigment-encrusted paintings of landscapes and everyday subjects such as musicians and soccer players. Last spring the Phillips Collection in Washington mounted a retrospective ofsorts called Nicolas de Stael in America. The Phillips tends to organize its shows in relation to its permanent collection, which has a number of works by de Stael, but this was anything but an "in house" show. Though now a somewhat forgotten figure, de Stael was heavily collected in America in the fifties--hence the exhibition's title. Yet this show never made it to New York. Indeed, the only museum to take the exhibition was the Cincinnati Art Museum. This lack of interest would be
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