Whitney: American Legends

The only exhibit now open at the Whitney is American Legends: From Calder to O'Keefe, a selection of works by thirteen artists from the museum's permanent collection.  So impromptu is the presentation that one has the sense that the show was hurriedly assembled for no other reason than to have something on the walls following the close of the Biennial on May 25th.  Admission was complimentary on the day I visited, and the galleries were almost empty.

There is no theme, at least none that I could discover, that holds this exhibit together other than that all the artists shown were active at some point in the twentieth century.  No documentation, not even a press release, is available to visitors; and the small placards placed on the wall contain only a paragraph or two of information.  Overall, the whole proceeding, organized by curator Barbara Haskell, has a slapdash feel to it.  For example, there may very well be a valid reason Hopper's paintings were placed in a room opposite Eggleston's chromogenic photo prints; but whatever that purpose, it is never explained to the viewer.

This is not to suggest that the exhibit is not worth visiting.  Not only are there on display masterpieces by such well known masters as Lichtenstein and O'Keefe, but there are also represented artists who are perhaps not so famous but whose work certainly deserves to be seen more often.  Prominent among these is Morris Graves, an expressionist painter who was active in the Pacific Northwest.  The three paintings shown by Graves are all from a relatively early period in his career and all feature birds as their subjects.  There is one dark brooding work whose title I cannot remember, completed during World War II, that shows a raven and a ghostly helmeted figure in the background that is quite powerful.

Another often overlooked artist whose works are on display is Alice Neel, as well knows for her political activism and eccentric life as for her painting.  While her works reveal expressionist influences, they also have a pop sensibility and can be quite shocking in their graphic representation of subject matter.  Two of the more striking works now on display are Neel's portrait of critic John Perreault lounging nude on an unmade bed and a portrayal of a shirtless Andy Warhol that reveals to the viewer his abdominal scars and surgical corset, both the result of his having been shot in 1968 by Valerie Solanas.

Looking later at the museum's website I saw displayed in the "Works from the Exhibition" section a number of pieces I had not encountered at the exhibit itself.  At first I thought I had managed to miss a large portion of the show.  It was only when I looked more closely that I learned that this is a rotating exhibit, though when and how often changes are made is nowhere explained.  For the record, a full list of the artists currently on view is as follows: Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, William Eggleston, Morris Graves, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Elie Nadelman, Alice Neel, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The exhibit continues through June 29, 2014.