Always nice to end a run on one of Keiffer’s dreary, beautiful, oh so German fields. Speaking of Germans, I finally got to see Max Ernst at the Met… and well….dada beats surrealism most every time… I was a little diappointed that I didn’t like more of the show. I did like the grottage paintings and some of his constructed works… and I liked how he innovated with technique, but most of the work just felt oh so fussy to me… very up tight and anal prewar German, if you know what I mean (though I love German expressionism…). It took Pollock and Co. to bust these techniques out of the service of classical picture plane illusionism. So I wandered up to the roof and was pleasantly surpriesed by Sol Lewitt’s work (something that doesn’t happen often, I can assure you). The stuff is just made for the roof garden and plays nicely with the sky line and will be photographed ad naseum for this, like the Christo Gates. Context is everything with that generation and well this context works. I also got to revist Tony Oursler’s stuff and without the crowd, I could hear the performance on Climax…. reminds me a little too much of Willoughby stuff, but I can’t change it now. Folks were sitting down in the galleries and spending a lot of time with the pieces… so that’s a pretty high complement in an era of short attention spans (course they are watching t.v… so I guess they’re just used to sitting down and watching t.v…. even in the MET!).
Nice to see Guston and D.K. hanging together (continuing the debate between Allan Stone and David McKee abut weather Guston can hold up next to a deKooning). You sort of realize that D.K. has the best technique around and that Guston’s paint was getting muddy right before he went back to the figure… still if you play with the contrast, he has a hell of a line compositional sense and you see a wine bottle in the left corner and is the whole thing built from chairs like a Kline?
At the end of the day, however, the truth is that Alberto Giacometti can do more witha ball point pen than most people can do with marble, bronze, oil, video, architecture….and whatever else. This one is Diego and is from Pierre Matisse’s private collection.
