Among juggernauts like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the dazzlingly austere MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art often suffers the cruel fate of dismissal. And foolish dilettantes always have their reasons: “I find American art to be so common”; “The Whitney? It’s lesser Guggenheim”; “Oh, isn’t that next to Chanel?” Yet this hulking, Brutalist museum — a bull in the china shop of Madison Avenue’s boutiques — deserves more attention than it half-heartedly garners.
This past summer, the museum celebrated its 75th anniversary with a sweeping retrospective of salient American art. Exhuming work from the past 75 years, each floor of its Marcel Breuer-designed building was stocked with a wealth of artistic media, ranging from sadistic experimental videos to the requisite minimalist paintings that bore adults and children alike.
While only a portion of said exhibition remains extant (the Edward Hopper exhibit on the fifth floor), the museum is now host to a wealth of temporary exhibitions that showcase a stunning range of American artists, both obscure and well-known.
Wading past the Tods-swathed bourgeois milieu of the lobby, you’re immediately confronted with the abstract radial drawing of LA-based artist Mark Grotjahn. His works, a series of colored-pencil drawings that depict lines converging at skewered focal points, are visually arresting, but also alienating in the way that all non-representational modern art is. Ultimately, the work seems more a study of composition and perspective than anything rigorous in a cerebral manner. A glossy flyer at the exhibit’s entrance praises Grotjahn for condensing the volume of the room into the vortex-like vignettes that enclose the viewer. The ultimate effect, however, is decidedly more graphic, inspiring me to scour the museum shop for a dorm room poster so that I can slip “Oh, that’s recent Grotjahn” into conversation.
Really, that’s what these things are all about.
An ancient, moaning elevator transports visitors from Grotjahn’s wacky vectors to the more staid Edward Hopper retrospective on the fifth floor. Well-curated and well-attended, the Hopper exhibit is perhaps one of the best showings of the American painter’s oeuvre. Works like the canonical “Nighthawks” are on loan from other museums, providing a treasured in-person glimpse at the piece alongside its sundry charcoal studies. Figure studies for “Nighthawks” reveal a surprisingly careful attention to fabric and drapery — seemingly trivial minutiae — in a painting that seems to forgo an American painting tradition of realism for a cinematic effect. Perhaps the most successful components of the exhaustive exhibition are these studies, which provide a tangential messy aesthetic to his polished, inert final paintings.
The Hopper exhibition also reveals a great deal about the painter’s treatment of gender in figure drawing. In a compelling series of portraits, Hopper’s sallow-cheeked dandies are placed alongside bestial women with unexpected musculature. Curiously, these studies underscore Hopper’s human figures — usually lost in neon-lit, cavernous rooms — in a way that’s refreshing and unfamiliar.
Unfortunately, this cogent Hopper bliss dismantles on the fifth floor mezzanine, which crowds a small space with an incoherent variety of 20th-century photography, apparently another vestige of the 75th anniversary retrospective. Hope remains, however, in the form of a Nan Goldin slideshow hidden behind opaque walls and an “over 18” warning.
Obviously, Goldin’s photography — all pestilence and ’80s zeitgeist — isn’t for the casual fanny-pack tourist. The slideshow spans Goldin’s entire career as a photographer living in the bohemian squalor of 1970s/1980s Manhattan. Yet, all of this wild abandon is jarringly synthesized into thematic organization (i.e. pictures of kissing, anemic couples are grouped and shown with the musical accompaniment of Al Green). This all seems decidedly un-Nan Goldin.
Still, the slideshow is a unique opportunity to view Goldin’s work in its entirety, complete even to a fault. There seems to be little editing of the work in the show, often projecting pictures of questionable artistic merit before an already vulnerable and traumatized audience. Such instances recall more an idyllic laptop screensaver than a thoughtfully curated exhibition.
Luckily, the temporary exhibitions conclude on a more successful note with the “Picasso and American Art” showing. This extensive exhibit illustrates Picasso’s egregious influence on American artists in the 20th Century. Fortunately, the exhibit features many loaned Picasso pieces to juxtapose with decidedly less famous American contemporaries. While somewhat obvious in its approach, the exhibit is artful in mapping a trajectory in modern painting and modes of representation. A series of paintings by Lichtenstein (the poster child of the show) narrate a progression of his work from a literal comic book still to shredded cubism. Other juxtapositions compare early De Kooning with Picasso portraiture — the resemblances are unsettlingly congruous — before showing De Kooning’s work careening into its career-defining primitivism. While some of these comparisons seem to lack a careful nuance, the show is ultimately revealing in articulating the profound influence Picasso had on American painting and its ultimate dissolution into total abstraction. It’s a cute little stroll through art history.
Fortunately, the Whitney experience culminates at its gift shop, which recapitulates previously mentioned works of genius into overpriced posters and coffee table books. But even while elbowing past willowy Brooklyn hipsters for that last Chuck Close postcard, one can’t but feel overwhelming adoration for this museum, which is terribly overlooked. Despite its awkwardly posh surroundings and annoying clientele — aged art snobs sighing thick ennui — it’s perhaps the best venue for contemporary American art. Or at least pretentious posters.