“Susan Rothenberg: Paintings & Drawings,” at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington,
D.C.
February 10—May 9, 1993
What happens when, over time, the critical apparatus attached to a living artist’s work falls away, leaving his audience to confront the work plain? The question first occurred to me some fifteen years ago, at the Kenneth Noland retrospective at the “old” Guggenheim Museum. At that exhibition, I looked at Noland’s paintings and, with the cadences of formalist criticism beating less urgently in my ears, they appeared thin and bloodless, far less substantial than I had previously thought.
Something similar happened to me at the current Susan Rothenberg retrospective. This show, comprising more than forty paintings and some thirty drawings, confirmed my uneasy suspicion that Rothenberg, too, is not the artist I had thought her to be. Early on I saw her as a seminal figure in contemporary painting. Now I see her as an artist who, like one of her signature horses, came out of the gate at a gallop, but who soon flagged, unable to go the distance.
When Rothenberg’s work first appeared in the late 1970s, most famously in the Whitney Museum’s “New Image Painting” show of 1978-79, it was widely considered to have given painting a new energy and direction. Her silhouettes of horses, situated on fields of feverishly worked brushstrokes, reintroduced recognizable images to painting when abstraction was still the dominant orthodoxy. At the same time, Rothenberg’s work kept faith with