Museums

If you didn't know, I love art museums. I'm a big fan of 20th Century art and I try to make it a point to visit art museums in each new city I go to. In the past week I've visited two of my favorite NYC museums, the Met and the Whitney.

The Met is always great. I sometimes feel bad because all I do is head directly to the modern wing. But this time they had not one but two exhibits I was interested in. One was a collection of paintings that had passed through the hands of legendary French art dealer Vollard, mostly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, and Picasso. Good stuff for sure. The second exhibit was German expressionist portraits from the 30s. Fascinating stuff. And then there's the modern part of the permanent collection which I really love. The Met's collection is concise but thorough (well, maybe not that thorough, would it kill them to hang one Basquiat?). I've been there so much I know exactly where my favorites of their collection are including a great Pollack, two amazing Chuck Close portraits, and a beautiful Modigliani nude. I must've been at the museum for three hours. It's one of my favorites in the world.

Unfortunately I didn't have a great experience at the Whitney. The Whitney is a museum of American art so there's usually plenty of modern stuff which is why I dig it so much. And like the Guggenheim there's no real permanent collection on display, it's all exhibitions. The first exhibit was fine, it featured works from two German artists (Moholy-Nagy and Albers) who relocated to the USA after Hitler closed the Bauhaus where they both taught. The second exhibit might've been the finest I've seen in both museums; Kiki Smith: A Gathering. I really loved it. Her work is hard to explain so I won't try save to say it is thoroughly modern and adventurous but direct and less confusing than most 20th Century artists.

So I was really excited to see the next exhibit which has been getting a lot of hype, it's called Picasso and American Art. It features different Picasso's hung next to American works they inspired. Sounds interesting right? Wrong. I hated it. As a jazz musicians I know that it's important to understand influences, where artists have "come from" aesthetically, etc. But this exhibition implies that artists are nothing more than their influences, specifically Picasso. De Koonig, Graham, Gorky, and Weber, names that are not very well known among the occasional museum-visitor, are made to look like they are nothing more than Picasso imitators and that is just not the case. Seeing similar paintings in the same room really numbs your eyes and you find yourself searching for the similarities (no matter how subtle) instead of really checking out the painting. The best is a room in the exhibit where works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol are hung. Many of these pieces bear the name (or the subtitle) After Picasso. It's like the exhibitors couldn't even make the distinction between 'influence' and 'homage'!

When I heard a lady turn to her husband and say "they all copied Picasso didn't they?" and he replied "they still do!" I knew it was time to go as I feared this exhibit was doing a real disservice.

I should say that they had a room of early Pollack's that I really loved (his figurative pre-paint-splashing phase). But at the end of the day it seemed like the exhibit was just an excuse to hang some Picasso's and get some more bodies into the Whitney.

Pretentious rant concluded.