The inaugural exhibition at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, highlighting the work of the New York School, has an academic grounding that doesn't preclude instinctive responses, writes Aidan Dunne.
It's appropriate that Modern American Painting, the main inaugural exhibition in the new Lewis Glucksman Gallery at University College, Cork, is drawn from the NYU, the New York University art collection. It is, furthermore, work that relates directly to NYU's location, in that it highlights the artists of what has been termed the New York School. Mind you, the catalogue includes a perceptive, prophetic quote from one of the best known of those artists, Willem de Kooning: "It's disastrous to name ourselves." And it's useful to remember that, despite the various statements, interviews and writings by the artists, the term "school" is more definite and laden with implications than was the reality.
When Maurice Tuchman curated an exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum in the mid-1960s he effectively, and legitimately, nominated a canonical 15 figures as the central artists of the New York School, leaning more towards Abstract Expressionism than any wider view of figuration and geometric abstraction. Many of those 15 are included in the Glucksman show, but its net is also cast more widely.
It aims, in fact, to challenge and extend our perception of the New York School and American painting of the time. In other words, what is on view in Cork does not represent a trawl through the NYU collection with the aim of landing a catch of tried and trusted favourites. There should also be unfamiliar species in the catch.
It is only fair to point out immediately that an exhibition featuring single examples of the work of a large number of artists is highly unlikely to have such a decisive, transformative effect. Chances are that, if you have some level of awareness of American painting from the 1940s onwards, you will encounter familiar and unfamiliar names, variously represented by works that delight, interest or disappoint you. Even tried and trusted individuals can have many an off day, which is why a single work is only occasionally definitively representative.
It's striking, as well, that in the vein of geometric abstraction, several artists in the show, specifically Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller and Charmion Von Wiegand, produced work that is exceptionally close to, to the point of being overshadowed by, a common, dominant exemplar, Piet Mondrian, whose right-angled, grid-based paintings might as well have a trademark stamp.
ALL ARE INTERESTING, immensely capable artists, but it's easy to see why the efforts of Hans Hoffman, de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, (the latter two not in this exhibition, incidentally, just relevant examples in context), in moving their work beyond its European roots, was so significant.
Equally, when James Elkins inquires in his fine, interrogatory catalogue essay, how the work of the New York School might be perceived elsewhere, what it might mean in other cultural contexts, and draws on the example of Europe, he mentions that French and other painters were producing stylistically comparable paintings before their American counterparts. He cites Pierre Soulages.
Yet, it struck me, immediately and forcefully, as an art student, how European painters - very much including Soulages - just couldn't do Abstract Expressionism. They came at it from too contained and constrained a framework. They couldn't make the leap. Elkins also mentions Zao Wou-Ki, an outstanding Paris-based Chinese painter, and an artist who, it could be argued, never achieved his full potential, because of intervening factors along the way including, perhaps, his geographical location.
Tuchman's list of 15 artists included not a single woman, which is largely understandable in terms of his historical moment but is, by any objective standard, indefensible, given that one could, with a little effort, put together an alternative list made up exclusively of women, only one of whom, Helen Frankenthaler, is in the Cork show. Like the more recent Neo-Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism had the reputation of being a testosterone-charged movement, best exemplified in the person of hard-drinking, hard-living Jackson Pollock, the artist who made the cover of Life magazine in 1949 and put contemporary American painting on the map in terms of its public profile. Kent Minturn of Columbia University titles his catalogue essay: There's Someone Missing Here: It's Pollock, in pre-emptive acknowledgement of Pollock's absence from this show.
In the context, Pollock is the significant absence. But Minturn's examination of that absence is also a preamble to a brilliant discussion of what he regards as the best work included, Robert Rauschenberg's Collage with Horse, which is partly about moving on from Pollock and incorporates a range of pictorial strategies that are still current.
The Abstract Expressionists quickly became the giants who had to be killed. In his essay, Elkins observes that, even today, art students, wanting to distance themselves from the tainted Modernist ambition of the Expressionists, generally do so by informing themselves fully about them, not by ignoring them.
It's possible to think of contemporary art that has been made expressly with the aim of putting some ironic distance between the artist and Abstract Expressionism, purely to show how knowing and sophisticated is the postmodernist sensibility: the artist as footnote. The question of how to negotiate a position for yourself as a painter in the postmodern arena is still open.
Elkins, Minturn and Lynn Gumpert (who provides an account of the NYU collection and is director of the Grey Art Gallery, where it resides) do sterling work in terms of providing a framework within which to view the exhibition. But, with the academic emphasis, something does get left out.
IMAGINE TWO WAYS of looking at the work in the Glucksman. In the first, you go along armed with the catalogue, having digested the various texts. In this earnest mode, you ask yourself what relevance the New York School might have in an Irish and European context, what it might mean now. You look at it in terms of its role in an historical progression of ways of making and looking at art. You consider it in terms of the evolution of New York City and its institutions.
In the second, rather more indolent mode, you wander into the Glucksman Gallery. You probably think: this is a nice, no, a beautiful building, attentive to its context, pleasant to be in. Starting on the ground floor and working your way upwards, you look at the art on display. There are terrific pieces from the UCC collection there, by Janet Mullarney, Hughie O'Donoghue, Katherine Bueg and many more. In the subdued light of an enclosed gallery, you look at a superb, effortlessly engrossing collection of prints by Albrecht Dürer from the Chester Beatty Collection. And then, on the airy top floor space, you encounter Modern American Painting.
You let your eye lead you. Nice geometric compositions in primary colours. Cubist-inspired abstractions. A rather beautiful Philip Guston - albeit an unfashionable, abstract Guston, not the later, comic-book one; a strangely compelling Alex Katz, despite or perhaps because of the emotional disengagement of the seated figure and the deadpan way she is depicted; a double nude composition by Philip Pearlstein which may be disconcerting because it is slightly transgressive in terms of the conventions of life drawing . . .
In this mode, more often than not, the claim art makes on your attention is not particularly rational. You don't respond to something because, pace the sociologist Pierre Bordieu, it is the appropriate object of approbation within the social level we inhabit or aspire to. Or because we recognise that it is in some other way culturally appropriate, instructive or informative. But because it speaks to you on some instinctive level. Because it seems to offer an insight into what it means to be alive, or to be human. Which is perhaps the level that counts.
Modern American Painting is at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, until December 22nd. tel: 021-4902760