BWW Reviews: Surveying Painting's Domain with THE FOREVER NOW at MoMA

Whatever else it was designed to accomplish, The Forever Now has succeeded in being a superbly divisive exhibition. Was this supposed to happen? It doesn't seem so: the seventeen contemporary painters in this showcase are all established names in the international gallery scene, though surely not household names anywhere. The show's emphasis--summed up in its subtitle, Atemporal Painting for a Contemporary World--is throughly anodyne. (As curator Laura Hoptman explains in her catalog essay, we live in "a state of the world in which, courtesy of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once." Surprised? Of course not.) And perhaps most importantly of all, the hosting venue is the Museum of Modern Art, an institution that knows that alienating visitors with artists they've never heard of isn't a wise marketing strategy. Crowds will surge in to be provoked and irritated by Marina Abramovic or Jeff Koons, but Richard Aldrich, Rashid Johnson, Dianna Molzan? No, no, and no.

Yet divisive this exhibition is, in large part because Hoptman has ranged so broadly over contemporary painting, plucking up artists who (atemporality aside) have so little in common. Any given viewer will inevitably love some and hate others: Jason Farago at The Guardian and Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker were regularly at odds when separating the luminaries from the losers, and would probably disagree with my judgments too.

On the whole, the show is an acid test, and not just for individual tastes--an acid test for the vitality and the future of painting as a whole. At midcentury, MoMA staged Fourteen Americans (1946) and Sixteen Americans (1959), momentous and controversial exhibitions that asked, "Where is painting headed? What more can it do?" Curated by Dorothy Miller, these shows brought their visitors a Greatest Generation of American art--Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly--and delivered these artists' answers to those questions. In such hands, what couldn't a canvas do?

Seventeen artists and quite a few decades later, The Forever Now reveals the uneasy prospects that painting must now confront. The most socially engaged and theoretically dense works here are among the most regrettable; the most conservative and painterly are among the most remarkable. If you are an aspiring young artist, see this show, go home, and push back against almost everything you have witnessed. Heed that "almost everything," because there are also paintings on display that have the coherence and the promise of the most important entries in those Americans shows. Miller's exhibitions were earthquakes of innovation; Hoptman's offering opens small, crucial fissures of opportunity. Find them and break through.

Still, in at least one respect, The Forever Now makes tangible progress from those earlier MoMA milestones: non-male, non-white, and non-Manhattan artists are decently represented this time. Actually, in terms of gender, make that astonishingly well represented. Of the seventeen artists, nine are women. The other big contingent, randomly enough, is Germans--three out of seventeen, and that number includes some of this show's finest participants. But of course there are big oversights: only one artist from Latin America, only one from Africa, none from Asia. No representational art of particularly great substance, either. To visit this exhibition is to get the troubling impression that portraiture, still life, ensemble painting, and landscape painting will die with David Hockney and Alex Katz. All this, however, can be and should be thought about at a distance, because some of Hoptman's selections are formally blistering in the best way.

The show begins with Kerstin Brätsch's Blocked Radiant series. These huge oil-on-paper entries, with their encroaching black tendrils and obscured bright orbs, show a young artist fully in command of a somewhat unexpected medium. Brätsch takes the odd material with traditions setup even farther in Sigi's Erben (Agate Physics), a glass, agate, and painted aluminum construction that is an homage to Sigmar Polke and perhaps also to Marcel Duchamp, the modernist master of this sort of assemblage. It's not a completely satisfying work, but it seems like a first step towards something amazing. For more painterly pleasures, spend some time with Mark Grotjahn's imposing entries--palette-knife compositions that draw in every color imaginable, and that evoke masks, feathers, leaves, bridge cables, and sights you may only see if there is an afterlife. His methods are different from those of Julie Mehretu, who combines ink and synthetic polymer to create paintings that are once stony and airy. In all these cases, the results are immersive. At least vigorous all-over painting didn't die with Jackson Pollock.

After a while, I began to sense that Hoptman's aesthetic instincts were nudging her towards Abstract Expressionism and its offshoots. I began to wish, too, that she had been more true to those instincts. There are more Pop-ish works in The Forever Now, and it is painful to watch Hoptman blunder around with some of these--too little of the incidental beauty and none of the saving personality and irony of actual Pop Art here. Nicole Eisenman's numerous Guy paintings, for instance, too often look like oversized emoticons. And too many of the selections from Oscar Murillo, Josh Smith, and Michael Williams look like they belong on the undersides of skateboards. While these are deficient artworks, they are not embarrassments-though I can't say the same of Joe Bradley's untreated canvases, each one laden with simplistic forms and bland, bad critical theory talking points. (Hoptman tries to justify these by talking about "archetypes," to no avail at all.) This exhibition proves, among other things, how dreadful such re-heated radicalism tastes: elsewhere, Murillo has allowed MoMA to take a few of his canvases off their stretches and put them on the floor, for visitors to play with. Maybe a radical gesture (and that's a big maybe) in 1924, but a cute and idiotic one in 2014.

When it moves away from such "atemporal," "culturally conscious," and "frankly not good" art and celebrates formal pleasures--shape, line, color, mood--the show seldom disappoints upfront. There are other abstract and semi-abstract artists here whose calm mastery wisens and elevates the entire exhibition: Michaela Eichwald, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Mary Weatherford are all worth close looking. As Hoptman explains in the catalog, these abstractionists have ancestors different and impressive as Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keefe, and Morris Louis--and that's just the problem. None of these artists stumbles over a past model as badly as Matt Connors--a sort of unpolished and unmemorable Ellsworth Kelly--stumbles over his. None, however, breaks free of the past. Even an artist as adept as Sillman takes her predecessors--Gorky and de Kooning--and siphons off their wildness. In the most rarefied aesthetic fashion, her works are better than the average Gorky. That doesn't make them transformative art, atemporality or no atemporality.

However, the bliss of originality can be found in The Forever Now. After I finished running the rounds of Hoptman's galleries, I went back to Brätsch's entries. Though part of me simply wanted to conclude an exhibition this mixed with my personal best in show, I also felt that there was something more to be learned from those blocked radiances, in the context of everything else I had seen. So many of Hoptman's selected artists try to balance formal majesty with counterintuitive ordinariness (or outright ugliness), but only Brätsch gets this equation right. (Grotjahn, my almost-best in show, is majesty redoubled.) Yes, there is contemporary painting that can propel art forward--past Abstract Expressionism, past Polke, past MoMA--but it is once more pure yet more generous, more disciplined yet more courageous, than a good number of the paintings here on display. Why should I be surprised? In every era, artistic eminence has been a game of fearsome odds. Two or three out of seventeen isn't bad.