Artistic Manners

The effect was confounding. Collages before had been on a more modest scale, something done with scissors and paste. There were precedents in the Cubists, and Stuart Davis had even paid homage to ad layouts on a fairly large scale. But this was like Times Square, and the import of its iconography was not clear. It seemed to approve its disparate and incommensurable elements. There was a celebratory air to the cheap spaghetti, a mechanic’s respect for the gleam and the thrust of the jet. In 1965–as now–one expected every artist to contemn that sort of thing, and the Guggenheim flyer for a new exhibition insists that disdain had been, in fact, the artist’s intent back when he painted it: “This room-scale painting, measuring 86 feet in length, was named after a fighter bomber then in development for the Vietnam War and was painted in response to the military-industrial complex that fostered America’s booming midcentury economy. . . . It was an antiwar statement approaching the significance and power of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’.”

Rosenquist is on record as concurring with that view of his work, and it is doubtless a prudent spin to put on things, but to my mind it is no more an antiwar or anti-consumerist statement than Warhol’s iconic Campbell soup cans are. Indeed, Warhol registers as cool next to Rosenquist’s carnivalesque brio. The king-sized slices of cake in his works are meant to seem tasty–albeit for gargantuan and indiscriminating appetites. They may be ironic, like the cake that Marie Antoinette commended to hungry mobs, but it was a true representation of the American dream, not the American nightmare.

Artists express meanings in their paintings that are not easily or prudently expressed in words. Botticelli’s and Michelangelo’s nudes openly espouse beliefs that their early admirers could not have endorsed if they had been spelled out in cold print. Theirs was an Enlightenment before the fact. Similarly, the pleasure of attending the Guggenheim’s recent Rosenquist retrospective comes from pondering what Rosenquist was on about, the sense he was able to make of the mushrooming growth of our global village through the 1960s and onwards. A preview, so to speak, of “Blade Runner.”

Rosenquist’s prophetic gifts do diminish as one mounts the Guggenheim’s ramp toward the present, or perhaps our attention wearies. But even at his most formulaic, when he has nothing better to do than process earlier icons through a shredder, his forms and colors gratify the eye. No one, not even Léger, loved cylinders more than he; no one else in the Pop Art crowd was a more exuberant colorist. He was the Brian Wilson of the paintbrush.

You might suppose the huge continuous interior of the Guggenheim would be the right setting for a Rosenquist retrospective, but in fact even his largest works (except the self-enclosed “F-111”) come across as insufficient in scale. I wanted to see them along a highway, at true billboard dimensions, or, lacking that, in a smaller convention space in which they could loom large. At the Guggenheim they are cropped by the architecture of the ramp, and you can’t back off for a distanced view. In tomorrow’s ideal mega-America there will be a Rosenquist Museum bigger than all Dia: Beacon, where the works can be seen to full advantage.

A LITTLE WAY UP FIFTH AVENUE, at the Jewish Museum, there is still time to catch a fascinating show combining works by Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and the Munich Blue Rider Group. The show hinges on the auspicious presence of Kandinsky at a Munich concert of works by the Viennese Schoenberg on January 2, 1911. The resulting painting, the almost-abstract “Impression III (Concert)” was the immediate fruit, and the long-term result was Schoenberg’s honorary membership as one of the Blue Rider group of painters.

Schoenberg’s canvases do him at least as much credit as Prince Charles’s watercolors do the House of Windsor. If they do not quite measure up to the works of Kandinsky, Franz Marc, or August Macke, in whose company they first appeared in the Blue Rider Exhibition of 1911, they are no embarrassment. Schoenberg understood that the fauvists (the Blue Rider painters were fauvists in all but nationality) had licensed amateurs like him to get in the pool and splash around. When he tries to do traditional pen-and-ink drawings, like his “Self-Portrait” of 1908, Schoenberg is more or less a klutz, but in a little while he’s scrawling expressionistic daubs at the level of the late Philip Guston, and he brings off full-length portraits of his wife and of Alban Berg that would get him admitted to most art schools.

Kandinsky, of course, is mind candy, with the effervescence of those who are class president, most popular, most likely to succeed, and star quarterback all at once. He was also an incredible bully and blowhard (try any paragraph of his 1912 manifesto “On the Spiritual in Art”), but that is the price to be paid for genius.

The catalogue accompanying the show is notable not just for its excellent color plates and contextualizing essays but for a CD that replicates the 1911 Munich concert. Short of shaking the hands of all concerned, you can’t get much closer to the original events. Seeing the show with its vistas of modernity in its happy springtide, one can only wish that the twentieth century had stopped right there.

INSTEAD, alas, it continued on through two world wars and some dozen more revolutions in the arts, each less fruitful than the last, down to our own sorry and diminished moment. Or so it seems on the half-empty days of the new century, already at work on its own post-postmodern zeitgeist. On half-full days, both the past and future seem much brighter. With a bit of philosophy one can consign one’s bêtes noires to their probable oblivion and take heart from seeing the good guys reap their eventual rewards. Arshile Gorky, for instance, whose whole life was a series of narrow squeaks and car crashes ending in suicide at age forty-four, and who, even so, achieved such mastery that the Whitney Museum is hosting a retrospective devoted exclusively to his drawings. And most deservedly, for Gorky was the drawing-master of the dawning age of abstract expressionism, who taught a clueless generation of apprentice draftsmen how to draw not from antique casts but directly from the collective unconscious.

The theory behind his freed-up drawing style derived from surrealism, one inflected by Picasso, not Dali, a style he appeared to have brought across the Atlantic with him when he escaped the Armenian genocides of his homeland as a teacher. As the skies of Europe continued to darken, Gorky showed himself to be an artistic prodigy in New York, exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, at age twenty-six. He would be recognized, along with Pollock and de Kooning, as one of the founding fathers of the new American style. Clement Greenberg saluted him in 1948 as “among the very few contemporary American painters whose work is of more than national importance.” The Whitney’s show, almost half a century later, confirms Greenberg’s opinion. Within months he was immobilized by a car crash and took his life soon after.

Gorky was among the rare painters to take abstraction into the open seas of complete nonreferentiality while simultaneously offering surfaces and spaces of baroque complexity. The Whitney show and its excellent catalogue constitute a primer and pattern book for post-graduate students of drawing from the right side of the brain. De Kooning had the same knack but his concern was always more painterly. Gorky, like da Vinci, was a draftsman first and last, an anatomist of ectoplasmic bodies, a mapmaker of non-Euclidean lands.

If you go to museums for entertainment rather than instruction, you need only mount one flight of stairs to be a world–and three generations–away from Arshile Gorky. John Currin also achieved an early success on the art scene and didn’t have to wait nearly as long as Gorky for his Whitney retrospective. At forty-one, Currin is the youngest certifiably important artist on the scene today–which has ticked off those of his elders who regard his paintings as retrograde and infra dig: all these paintings of anorectic, grimacing women, clothed and unclothed, the dorky men, the smug gays, the awful prettiness of everything, the intermittent slickness, surfaces that shift from cold cream to acne. Name a single respectable painter who paints like this!

CURRIN’S WHITNEY CATALOGUE references pictures by such déclassé painters as Norman Rockwell and the sci-fi illustrator Frank Frazetta. The women he paints are notable for breasts impossibly immense, contorted poses, long-lashed googly eyes, and an air of unconquerable niceness. He often goes to great lengths to give the flesh he paints the hues and textures of peaches in a high-resolution still-life; then, in the same picture, there is a face like a drunken dowager with Parkinson’s disease. Each of these elements alone would have been a disqualification for exhibiting a painting within a one-mile radius of the Whitney; together, they are all that a cultivated taste should deplore. Their only conceivable excuse is that they are Bad Paintings aforethought.

But that isn’t it at all. Currin is repainting the history of art, not necessarily in chronological order. Just read his interview at the end of the catalogue for his own mission statement. Nothing painted is foreign to him, and if it seems relevant to the particular image he is working on, he’ll try it on for size. It is the telling image that is his special knack, as it was Raphael’s or Daumier’s or Norman Rockwell’s–a picture that stops you in your tracks like the gaze of Coleridge’s wedding guest.

A case in point, “The Cripple” (1997): a skinny, well-breasted woman clenching a cane and smiling fiercely, her body contorted with a mad determination to be beautiful, a pin-up from purgatory. Impossible to look at the picture and not begin to plot the novel it would be the cover of. Hogarth did this sort of thing, as did Goya when he was off his leash, but well-bred painters head for the archetypes.

OFTEN CURRIN’S SATIRIC INTENTION is blatant, as when two fifty-eight-inch-busted women are shown measuring each other’s endowments, but his more clever things (and they constitute a small throng) have a sideways thrust or a gratuitous, unfathomable silliness that doesn’t yield to interpretation. His best figure studies are as fey and yet unproblematic as a Parmigianino (another Mannerist who liked to give his sitters some five or six extra vertebrae by way of enhancing their charms).

Mannerists, finally, are only interested in painting, the art itself, with all its illusory possibilities, technical challenges, and low vibrations. Does anyone really care what El Greco thought about the Holy Trinity? It’s the way he makes it look like a launch from Cape Canaveral that keeps us coming back for more. With Currin, too, I’m sure I’ll be back for more.

Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.