Subverting the dominant installation

So, the Ellsworth Kelly-from-the-collection show at MoMA got me thinking... When you enter the fifth-floor galleries at MoMA, the installation encourages you to see American abstract art in a certain way: Here are the biomorphic (Barr's word!) abstractionists: Gottlieb, Gorky, and so on. Then there's de Kooning who was interested in the figure, but enough of that, and skipping right along... Out of Picasso and biomorphism came Pollock, and he changed everything. Here's Jack working through Picasso, here's Jack working through narrative, here's Jack working through Matta and surrealism. And, then, finally, here's a great drip painting, the culmination of all that (linear) achievement: One: Number 31, 1950.

Phew. Then you take a deep breath, turn around, and see what comes after Pollock: Newman, Rothko, Still, and, for the moment, that collection-based Ellsworth Kelly installation.

MoMA's installation, which is in part an accident of architecture and in part not (someone put all those Pollocks together and banished everyone else), encourages us to see Pollock as the titan, the artist who, along with Picasso and Matisse gets a MoMA gallery to himself. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that everything else in American hero painting stems from Pollock, that it all comes after him, that no one else is worthy of sharing his space. As proof, at MoMA those other artists all are after Pollock, not with him.

OK, but that's not how it happened -- and MoMA's smart Kelly gallery provides a nice entree to consider an alternate installation.

The anchor of MoMA's Pollock gallery is the great 1950 painting I mentioned earlier. By coincidence MoMA's new Kelly, Relief with Blue from St. Louis' Donald Bryant (that's another story entirely) is also from 1950. So for the rest of the day I'll be featuring American abstraction from 1950 as a way of demonstrating that Pollock was part of what was going on and that he wasn't everything that was going on. (In the case of heroic abstraction he wasn't even first -- as James Demetrion has noted, Still was there before any of his peers, including Pollock. For a variety of reasons having to do with Still's prickliness, MoMA's influence in forming the history of 20thC American abstraction, the confluence of the two, and on and on, Still just doesn't get much dap.) So check back often throughout the day as we enter the MAN-MoMA time machine and consider what a gallery of 1950 might look like...

The posts: Kline and Guston. Diebenkorn and Rothko.

Related: Jerry Saltz has long suggested that MoMA mix it up a bit more. Here's one of his suggestions.