Subverting the dominant installation, part four

Yesterday, before Carol Vogel's latest mistakes hit MAN, I was moving through a series of posts about MoMA, Pollock, and 1950. Here's the intro.

So, back to the diversity of abstract painting practice in 1950, a diversity rather thoroughly masked by MoMA's Pollock-centric installation of its post-war collection. You wouldn't know it from MoMA's collection presentation (and maybe you shouldn't), but one of the most remarkable next-steps of American high-abex was the birth of minimalism. Yesterday I posted a 1950 Ellsworth Kelly painting that had almost nothing in common with what Pollock was doing in 1950. Today: 1950 paintings from Barnett Newman (that's Vir Heroicus Sublimis) and Ad Reinhardt (Number 107).

Newman, who was a particular favorite of Donald Judd, started painting minimally in 1948 when he made the Onement paintings. Onement I is on view at MoMA now and in part because of its diminutive size and in part because of where it's hung, it feels lost. (It's across a gallery from Vir Heroicus, which is such an awesome painting that it makes almost everything around it look like a speck.)

Imagine Onement I hung next to Pollocks' gigantic Number 1A, 1948, a painting 16 times as large. That would make it pretty clear that Pollock wasn't the only game in town. (More on that tomorrow.)

Ad Reinhardt's Number 107 is also shockingly different from Pollock (and Newman, Still, etc.) While Reinhardt fills space in much the way the others do, he does it with a maximum of painterly economy: Look at all that blank canvas. To what extent can the canvas stay naked and be full? (To no one's surprise: A 1960-61 Reinhardt is installed near/with MoMA's minimalists.)

Previously: Ellsworth Kelly. Philip Guston and Franz Kline. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko.