Nothing is more remarkable about the art of the last quarter-century than the diminished role played by abstraction in defining the course of contemporary artistic thought. Where abstraction had not so long before been the mark of an “advanced” aesthetic sensibility, it was now increasingly said by critics, curators, and artists of many different persuasions to represent a conservative or academic or even reactionary attitude toward art and culture. Abstraction, which for decades had loomed as a vehicle of aesthetic emancipation, was now declared to be too idealistic, too formalistic, too metaphysical, too elitist, or too political—or else, in some cases, not political enough— to be accorded the high place that had formerly been ceded to it in the hierarchy of cultural achievements. Where in the past it had been denounced by reactionary politicians as part of the Bolshevik menace, abstraction was now dismissed by left-wing academics and their allies in the museums as an instrument of the Cold War against Communism.

At times, indeed, it has been difficult to know the exact nature of the case against abstraction. The charges emanated from so many diverse quarters and served such a wide variety of artistic and ideological interests. Did abstraction’s alleged delinquencies derive, as some now claimed, from an excessive reliance on the Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant—which in art circles was usually a code term for the critical views of the late Clement Greenberg—or from an unconscionable complicity in the Cold War ideology of Nelson Rockefeller and John Foster Dulles? Through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, the content of the indictment has undergone many changes— the only constant seems to be an unremitting hostility to the criticism of Clement Greenberg—but the campaign to discredit abstraction has continued to spread and garner support. It reflects one of the most stunning reversals of professional opinion in the art world since the so-called “triumph” of the New York School in the 1950s routed the philistine styles of the Depression era in the institutions that preside over the public life of contemporary art.

It is not the least of the disappointments caused by the exhibition called “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century,” which Mark Rosenthal has organized this season at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, that it fails so utterly to respond to this campaign of disparagement with a rousing and reliable account of the achievements of the subject. Neither as a coherent survey of the history of abstract art nor as a report on the current artistic outlook of abstraction can this exhibition be said to meet the needs of such a show in the last decade of the century that, in its opening years, saw the birth of the aesthetic aspiration it purports to document. As for the book-length catalogue that Mr. Rosenthal has written to accompany the exhibition, it is less a spirited defense of abstraction’s classic accomplishments than it is an academic reprise of the received ideas that have shaped the conventional view of abstract art for as long as anyone can now remember. Not only does it fail to take a fresh look at the place which abstraction occupies in the history of modern culture, but in its concluding pages Mr. Rosenthal’s text all but surrenders to the enemies of abstract art in a feckless attempt to appease and accommodate their assault upon it.

Thus, on the last page of his catalogue text Mr. Rosenthal can find nothing better to say on behalf of abstraction than that its fate will now be determined by the contemporary culture wars that consign the whole realm of high art to historical oblivion:  

Abstraction is in the category of “high art,” which claims a privileged position in society. Since all similar “high” manifestations have lately been discredited, or simply overwhelmed by popular culture, abstraction can hardly expect a different fate.

As a consequence, he worries that “the appearance now of a publication devoted to abstraction might therefore be regarded as an act of nostalgia”—which is hardly a ringing endorsement of abstraction’s achievements. Neither is his observation that “in the current art climate, abstraction might find a public that is relieved to escape art concerned with social and political issues,” for to condemn abstract art to a merely escapist role in cultural life is tantamount to declaring its cultural irrelevance. What all this mealy-mouthed equivocation adds up to is an admission on Mr. Rosenthal’s part that his principal concern is not to be seen as a supporter of an artistic enterprise that may now be stigmatized as elitist, politically incorrect, or otherwise opposed to the current ethos of the academy and the art world.

This is hardly a position from which a confident and comprehensive account of abstraction’s achievements could be expected to be mounted, and “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century” is not, in fact, an exhibition that even begins to do justice to those achievements. The only barely adequate section of the show is the one that focuses on the three pioneer talents of abstraction—Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich—yet even that section would have set the exhibition on a firmer foundation had the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian been given an even stronger representation. They were, after all, the artists who chartered the course from which many later abstractionists set off on their own. It is in the woeful underrepresentation of Kandinsky’s and Malevich’s contemporaries in the Russian avant-garde, however, that the “Abstraction” exhibition suffers its first collapse.

Russian abstraction in the years immediately preceding and following the Revolution of 1917 constituted one of the most remarkable periods in the entire history of abstract art. It produced varieties of abstraction—and for the first time, of course—that were not to be seen again on anything like the same scale of ambition until the much later work of Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Carl Andre, and certain other American abstractionists of the Minimalist and Color-field schools. (The fact that Louis and Noland are not even included in the exhibition is less a judgment of their work, I think, than a sign that Mr. Rosenthal did not wish to be seen to be influenced in his choices by the views of Clement Greenberg.) The inexplicable failure to accord Russian abstraction a role commensurate with its accomplishments creates, in any case, an aesthetic and historical void in the exhibition that cannot be filled, as Mr. Rosenthal has attempted to do, by a single stripe-painting by Olga Rozanova, a single construction by Naum Gabo, and three posthumous replicas of the work of Aleksander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin.

This crucial omission is also a reminder— and not the only one in the exhibition, either—that Mr. Rosenthal lacks one of the essential gifts needed for the effective presentation of his subject: an eye for the kind of historical rhyming that allows the spectator to see how, over the course of time, the stylistic innovations of one period are related to subsequent artistic developments to form what is, in effect, a distinct aesthetic tradition. In recent decades we have seen some excellent exhibitions of Russian abstraction both here and abroad, but what we have not had is an exhibition in which the Russian avant-garde is seen in the larger context of the entire history of abstraction in this century. This was certainly one of the things to be expected from a show at the Guggenheim Museum calling itself “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century,” but no serious attempt has been made to meet that expectation.

Nor is the marginalization of the Russian avant-garde in the exhibition the only example of a major movement central to the history of abstract art being passed over in favor of some highly dubious contemporary reputations. In this survey of abstraction, we are given Mondrian without the De Stijl group and Kandinsky without the Bauhaus. We aren’t given Paul Klee at all, or László Moholy-Nagy—which pretty much completes the erasure of the Bauhaus’s contribution to abstract art. (The two paintings by Josef Albers date from a much later period.)

The immense influence exerted by Dada and Surrealism on the next major phase of abstraction is also given remarkably short shrift in this exhibition. It is pathetic to see a figure of Jean Arp’s importance represented by two works, one of which is an embroidery by his wife, Sophie Taeuber! Kurt Schwitters, too, is kissed off with a single collage-construction, while even the greatest artist to effect an historic synthesis of Surrealism and abstraction—Joan Miró —is, with three paintings from the 1920s and nothing later, made to look like a far less important contributor to the history of abstract art than, say, Yves Klein or Barnett Newman or Richard Long. It is in decisions like these that the “Abstraction” exhibition verges on becoming a travesty. Miró, notwithstanding his own repeated disavowals of abstraction, is one of the giant talents of abstract painting—and a pivotal figure, moreover, in the formation of the kind of abstraction that came to dominate a good deal of the New York School. But that is still another of the aesthetic linkages that has been dropped down the historical memory hole in this exhibition.

Then, too, the entire course of American abstract art prior to the emergence of the New York School has been abridged in this show almost to the point of extinction. Marsden Hartley’s single painting in the exhibition, The Aero (1914), fine as it is, is hardly sufficient to represent the period in which the first generation of American modernists were creating some remarkable examples of early abstraction. Morton Schamberg’s construction of plumbing fixtures mounted on a box and mockingly entitled God (1917–1918)—to cite but one example—is certainly a more original contribution to abstraction than, say, John Chamberlain’s 1962 construction of automobile parts, and one that is directly related to the kind of Dada abstraction that is given so little attention here. But Chamberlain’s is now a high-profile reputation and Schamberg’s isn’t, and high-profile reputations are consistently given priority over artistic accomplishment in Mr. Rosenthal’s selections for this show.

A penchant for high-profile reputations has also governed the way the New York School is presented in the “Abstraction” exhibition. Only the art of Jackson Pollock is reasonably well represented in this section of the show. The omissions of Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky, among others, dash any hope that the newcomer to this important chapter in the history of abstract art will be able to make any historical sense of its emergence fifty years ago. So does the scant attention given to Willem de Kooning’s abstract paintings of the late 1940s. Mr. Rosenthal falls into line with the current cant among museum curators that late de Kooning is now the preferred de Kooning—never mind that the late paintings are often a mess—and that the crowning achievement of the New York School is, in any case, to be found in the art of Barnett Newman. Hence one of the largest single installations in the entire exhibition is given over to Newman’s oversize and overrated paintings.

The exhibition can scarcely be said to improve, moreover, as it approaches the problem of contemporary abstraction. Are we really expected to believe that Richard Long’s souvenirs of his long walking tours of sundry landscape sites are among the best things that contemporary abstract art has to offer? Is it really possible that even Mr. Rosenthal believes that the work he commissioned Frank Stella to create for this exhibition—an incoherent heap of aluminum and stainless steel called Schools and School Masters (1996)—is anything but a disaster? Long is included, I suppose, because the alleged ecological message of his art makes some pretense to overcoming contemporary abstraction’s reputed lack of involvement in social issues, and Stella is once again allowed to get away with murder—the murder of art, that is—because he is now considered in museum circles to be beyond criticism. After all, hadn’t we been told in 1987—on the occasion of his second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art— that his work called to mind “the lessons of Dante, Shakespeare, and Picasso”? If the work that Long and Stella are producing in the 1990s really does represent the best that contemporary abstraction has to offer, then the future of abstraction is indeed hopeless, and from that perspective it may therefore be more appropriate to regard “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century” as a protracted obituary of its subject rather than an account of its achievements.

It remains to be asked what exactly Mark Rosenthal had in mind in declaring that abstract art “claims” for itself “a privileged position in society.” In what sense does a Mondrian or a Kandinsky make a claim of this sort that is radically different from, say, the implicit claims made by a landscape by Monet, a Cubist portrait by Picasso, or a still life by Matisse? The latter, surely, avail themselves of the pictorial strategies of abstraction without plunging irreversibly into the realm of the purely abstract. But then, of course, there are abstract paintings by Mondrian and Kandinsky that avail themselves of the strategies of representation while going well beyond the depiction of recognizable objects. At what point in this dialectical process does abstraction begin to claim a greater privilege for itself? Mr. Rosenthal doesn’t say, of course—so we are left to wonder if, buried somewhere at the bottom of this shameless assertion, there lies nothing but some unexamined residue of the old Marxist denunciation of abstract art as “bourgeois formalism.”

Some such explanation certainly suggests itself when Mr. Rosenthal goes on, too, about high art having been “lately discredited”—yet another left-wing shibboleth he feels no responsibility to explain. Still it must be asked: if high art—and not only abstract art—has really been discredited, then what function is a curator of high art like Mr. Rosenthal performing in his duties as a guardian of our artistic heritage? I don’t think Mr. Rosenthal really believes that high art has been discredited, but the lip-service he pays to this political cant has obviously inhibited his ability to mount the kind of rousing exhibition that abstract art is in urgent need of at the present time. A great opportunity has been forfeited on the altar of received opinion.

Notes
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“Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline” opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on February 9, 1996, and remains on view through May 12. A catalogue of the exhibition, written by Mark Rosenthal has been published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Harry N. Abrams (310 pages, $75; $42.95 paper). Go back to the text.

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