Recent Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. New YorkReview by: Richard FrancisThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 971, Special Issue Devoted to Twentieth-Century Art(Feb., 1984), pp. 120-121Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/881497 .

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EXHIBITrON REVIEWS

domestic dramas set in a theatrical world: but no matter how explicit Picasso makes his representations, they always remain, at least to this observer, essen- tially private and emotionally inaccess- ible. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of formal invention in many of the late pic- tures, and it is at this level that the work is most engaging. The 1970 Family from the Musee Picasso, Paris, and the 1971 Seated woman with a hat are truly remark- able paintings; the 1972 crayon Self- portrait, lent from Japan, is one of the greatest of all the self-portraits.

The catalogue by Gert Schiff3 is not, as the jacket claims, 'the first critical assessment of the final decade of Picasso's life and work.' Jean Sutherland Boggs wrote a long essay on the subject for Picasso in Retrospect (Paul Elek, 1973), and Christian Geelhaar's 1981 exhibition and catalogue Picasso: Das Spdtwerk, 1964-1972 (Kunstmuseum Basel) covered the same ground in much the same fash- ion. But Schiffs essay constitutes an eminently readable account of the late work, one that is both sympathetic and insightful.

GARY TINTEROW

3 GERT SCHIFF: Picasso: The Last Years, 1963-1973. 144 pp. + numerous col. and b. & w. ills. (George Braziller, Inc., New York), $17.50.

New York Recent exhibitions of contemporary art

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, The Modern Drawing curated by John Elderfield, took a similar brief to Bernice Rose's A Century of Modern Draw- ing shown at the British Museum last year. Elderfield's choice was more con- servative, but nonetheless illuminating; it showed fewer recent works and had a greater European bias. The catalogue is exemplary, as are Elderfield's descrip- tions in his characteristically clear, informative prose.* The drawings all belong to the Museum and form a small part of the Department of Drawings col- lection which was built up principally by William Liebermann. English museums have not cared to make a commitment to twentieth-century drawings: this exhibi- tion exposed their relative poverties.

P.S. 1 (the Institute for Art and Urban Resources), the converted school in Long Island City directed by Alanna Heiss which is part studios and part handsome gallery, was host to a much-reduced version of the St Louis Museum's recent German painting exhibition Expressions. This version con- firmed the quality of Kiefer and Baselitz, but exposed weaknesses of sentimentality in Lupertz and bombast in Immendorf.

These differences were most clear in the first room. Intended, as in all P.S.1 shows, to offer a quick taste of each artist - one work by each hung closely together - with substantial offerings for the more intrepid in other rooms it was sadly unsatisfying, and like TV dinners, trivial- ised good solid fare.

Fashionable Francis Picabia, sup- ported by an introductory puff from Pro- fessor Robert Rosenblum (no less) was the first exhibition at the Mary Boone-Michael Werner Gallery, a German-American alliance sealed by matrimony (no less), with a glittering list of artists from both sides of the Atlantic. Whatever the virtues of Picabia's late works, they were not matched by the sec- ond offering, large, dark amorphous abs- tract paintings by Ross Bleckner. Metro Pictures had moved into a larger space, at 150 Greene Street, which gave Cindy Sherman the opportunity to exhibit work of a larger scale than usual, with a loaded psychological content. These works, superficially glamorous (even commis- sioned by fashion houses) are menacing, critical manipulations of the media's own methods.

Revivalism was at work, both in museums and uptown galleries. In the space used earlier in the year for its Biennial, a much-criticised survey of current American art, the Whitney Museum was displaying works from its own collection, entitled by its curator, Patterson Sims, From Minimalism to Expressionism. This was an extension of the long running display on the floor above of masterpieces of American art. The new display presumably began after JasperJohns's Three flags with a confusing array of both minimal and conceptual work. It was chronological, but too often made sidetracks to acknowledge odd vis- ual connections, and too frequently dis- placed an idea by trying too hard to explain it visually. This concept worked as an organising mechanism until the last years of the 1960s, where the unlikely combination of Neil Jenney, Richard Artschwager, Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris and Mel Bochner exposed its weakness. There are connections be- tween Artschwager and Jed Garet, but hardly those of the bland kind for which Sims argues (recessed formica compared with imitation wood framing is not enough). Artschwager's importance lies surely in his 'appropriations' of both images and materials, and the disquiet- ing banality of his objects. 'Image- scavenging' from the media, combined with new readings of Freud and with the fall-out from the art critical discourse of the seventies, is what is apparent in the work of, among others, Salle, Sherman and Longo. They also draw on Neil Jen- ney's arrogant misappropriation of the conventions of painting itself and the hang would have been better served by including a work such as Jenney's Press piece, rather than works by Bochner or Morris. Of the two works in this exhibi- tion byJenney, one was in the 'bad paint- ing' style of 1969, and the other, a more

recent, massively-framed (underlining the museum context) abstract-realist work entitled North America Abstracted. Expressionist works were restricted to the last quarter of the gallery, where a strange juxtaposition of William T. Wiley and Eric Fischl was dominated by the TV tower of Nam June Paik. Their connection with the transitional works tucked away in the single height space was not well made. Throughout, works were included because they happened to be available from the permanent collec- tion and should therefore be shown (e.g: Brian Hunt, David Novros, Al Held) rather than for secure critical reasons.

Minimalism was served better at the BlumHelman Gallery by an exquisite installation of early works by Don Judd, which included boxes, progressions and stacks and a red sculpture whose L-shaped wooden walls were joined by a thick metal pipe. The assurance of these works is remarkable, with the artist's careful control of his means. Judd's generative principle may be simple mathematics and thereby called mini- mal, but the works' presence is replete with art historical and psychological references. In this exhibition, Judd appeared as the true heir ofJasperJohns, elegant, authoritative and somewhat arrogant with regard to current succes- ses.

At the Paula Cooper Gallery there was the most enjoyable exhibition, a bravura installation (Fig.54) by Jonothan Borofsky at home after an exhausting showing in European museums over the last two years. He filled the gallery with anonymous grey wooden sculptures, a new breed of men whose large square jaws moved con- stantly. They 'jabbered' to several purposes-against political involvement in El Salvador, as representatives of Borofsky's urban nightmares, and as further manifestations of his publicly- displayed dreams. They were joined by older actors from Borofsky's repertoire - the man carrying the briefcase, an enormous futile dancing clown and his dogs and birds. Music, video, neon, and slide projections completed a jumbled funfair of the artist's psyche. In the smal- ler gallery, Borofsky showed drawings, and here, as in Basel earlier in the year, his extraordinarily obsessive repetition of images was more powerful.

The highlight of the New Year is undoubtedly Jasper John's first painting show for seven years (Leo Castelli, from 28th January). The new work is explicit, at points realistic, and comprehensive. Johns includes references to his earlier work alongside Leonardo, Freud, Grfinewald and others with everyday objects as counterpoints. They are not large, and are painted in a darkly-toned combination of oil and encaustic. Racing Thoughts, the title of the last work, depicts precisely that, a view that has been col- oured by a pessimism found in the first work in the exhibition, Celine of 1978.

RICHARD FRANCIS

*The Modern Drawing. ByJohn Elderfield. 216pp. + 100 col. pis. (Museum of Modern Art/Thames and Hudson, $37.50 HB; $16.50 PB (in exhibition), $18.50 thereafter.

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52. Carnival, by Max Beckmann. 1925. 160 by 100 cm. (Kunst- halle, Mannheim; exh. Stdidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frank- furt).

53. The barque, by Max Beckmann. 1926. 180.5 by 90 cm. (Feigen, New York; exh. Stidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt).

54. Paintings and sculpture by Jon Borofsky, installed at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, November 1983.

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