BWW Reviews: New Galleries, New Perspectives in AMERICA IS HARD TO SEE at the Whitney

The first-ever display in the re-located and re-designed Whitney Museum, America Is Hard to See is an ambitious, imperfect, and glorious show. It is anchored by artists who fit all these adjectives -- Alexander Calder, David Smith, Lee Krasner, Paul Chan -- and if the exhibition fails to achieve the coherence that curators Donna De Salvo, Dana Miller, and Scott Rothkopf were aspiring to, it reaches heights of visceral beauty that the curators perhaps never dreamed of. The entire affair, from the curators' and the museum's standpoint, has the aura of a once and once only opportunity: to find the best possible presentation for over 600 entries from the Whitney's permanent collection; to highlight the personality of architect Renzo Piano's new Whitney building; to say something of resonant value about both aesthetics and identity politics; and to begin fostering a loyal audience for both the museum and its Gansevoort Street environs. Not all these purposes are fulfilled; not all of them, in any artistic universe, could be. Yet item by item, the show is a stunner -- and that, more than anything else, is what should draw the crowds in and keep them coming back.

Piano's new-industrial Whitney is also a draw, though probably not for long. Navigating his other creations will always be more fun: the penchant for zigzags and walkways that he brought to the Centre Georges Pompidou is here confined to one set of external staircases. He has also duplicated one of the most prominent and most irksome features of Marcel Breuer's Upper East Side Whitney, a huge central elevator that both focuses floorplans and oppresses visitors. Does Piano, who was born in Genoa but has anchored his architecture in Manhattan and Paris, really have no idea how much New Yorkers hate waiting for these things? I ask because, elsewhere, he knows exactly what an improved Whitney should be about. The architecture of the new Whitney is an architecture of strategic sacrifice -- not always convenient or logical, but capable of drawing you up short with admiration just when you think it won't. The same, of course, could be said for the show it currently hosts.

One of the most pleasant surprises of America Is Hard to See is finding old Whitney favorites in new spots. The exhibition follows a top-down chronological layout (proving that, maybe, we can't live without that mammoth elevator) and takes off in the 1910s, when European innovations were sending tremors through the American art scene. Absolute first up in the exhibition is Alexander Calder's Circus, a menagerie of unpolished and endearing figurines that perform simple actions, and that were (if I remember correctly) hidden in a back gallery of the uptown Whitney. Here those figurines are positioned at the center of the exhibition's first floor, in a capacious circular display case. Keep in mind, though, that the circus was also a pet theme of Picasso and Leger. Calder could absorb European influence and preserve his independence, but other artists imported European innovations whole (Man Ray and his weird little assemblages), adapted European breakthroughs to native subjects (Joseph Stella and his dizzying portrayals of American bridges), or soldiered on past (the show's abundant, at times wearying, stretches of American realism). Within such an overview of American art are opportunities for closer connection. Many visitors will be delighted to see the Whitney's good but not revelatory suite of Edward Hoppers, though I was especially happy to see Florine Stettheimer and her cheerfully jumbled, Americana-ish works in attendance -- like seeing an old friend you thought had been left off the invitation list.

American art emerges from these early segments as more cosmopolitan and more unusual than the textbooks tend to make it. However, in the next section, the curators cannot help lapsing into an old legend -- the mid-century golden age of Abstract Expressionism -- but cannot be criticized for doing so, either. After some of the relatively tiny and earthbound entries on the previous floor, the exhibition soars with the colors of Pollock, de Kooning, and Lee Krasner, whose pink-and-green The Seasons occupies a large central wall. In fact, between this and her recent, emphatic presence at the Jewish Museum, Krasner has finally stopped being the most undervalued asset in the New York School. Sadly, something similar cannot be said of Richard Pousette-Dart or Norman Lewis -- who represent Abstract Expressionism at its most painstakingly baroque and are, as masters of smaller scale, placed in a nook to the side. These few frustrations nonetheless suggest possibilities -- imagine, if you will, the complex bliss of a whole floor of Pousette-Dart -- as do some of the bigger, better-treated entries. Imagine, too, an entire Whitney exhibit that teems with the white woodwork of Louise Nevelson or seethes and roars with the metal trappings and stitched canvas of Lee Bontecou. One-work artists here, possible Whitney headliners in years to come.

And then America Is Hard to See blows a hole in itself. In the midst of coordinating the Clyfford Stills, the Isamu Noguchis, and all the other displays of formal prowess, the curators must have decided it would be a good idea to turn the show aggressively political from 1965 on. Thus, a huge and ridiculous painting by Peter Saul and a cursory, needless section on the artistic response to Vietnam; thus, the obligatory but hard-to-remember entries from Robert Mapplethorpe, Kara Walker, and Robert Gober; thus, Ronald Reagan's head repeated and repeated on a giant expanse of wallpaper, courtesy of Donald Moffett. Only select screen and video artists seem to emerge from this with a thoroughly satisfying presence, perhaps because their work is too fluid and ironic to fall prey to the show's sociology. Nam June Paik is represented by a ziggurat of televisions, while Paul Chan and his shadow projections and Matthew Barney and his hanging cluster of televisions get rooms pretty much to themselves.

This is not the kind of exhibition that will set the Whitney's more traditional, more aesthetically pure visitors at ease; if anything, making Georgia O'Keefe and Nan Goldin part of the same grand narrative will only make things worse. Nor is this an exhibition to reassure those who had feared that Piano would turn the Whitney into a bulked-up New Museum. With windows. The galleries are broad, warehouse-like spaces activated by alcoves and partitions, which means that they offer long views and occasional surprises -- as smaller downtown galleries will, but here scaled larger and smoothed out. Whether Piano has created a building in harmony with nearby institutions or an Epcot Center version of the Meatpacking District isn't an easy issue to resolve, though I am inclined to go with the former, more charitable stance. With exhibitions on Frank Stella and Stuart Davis slated for the next twelve months, the Whitney is turning back to the spectacular yet esoteric art that it always did well. Then there are some of Piano's own moments of spectacle, which should disarm even the most cynical spectators of the museum industry.

More remarkable than any overarching structural harmony Piano has engineered are smaller passages of light, shade, and human gathering that were in some ways beyond his foresight -- yet that would be impossible without his architecture. The Whitney may indeed find a way to put Piano's frequent balconies to brilliant use, though now they serve mostly to give David Smith's sculpture a little air. Yet the one space that already seems fully realized is the picture window -- the one facing the Hudson -- on the Whitney's first full floor of galleries. The light that reaches you is as substantial and caressing as the light in a Hopper painting. This is where you can find a couch where you can rest, and watch the water, and think a little about the fellow museum-goers sitting nearby, before you resume the joyful labor of thinking about America Is Hard to See.

Thus the history of the new Whitney begins.

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