Abstract Expressionist New York at the Museum of Modern Art Review

The next big show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City opens on Sunday, October 3rd, and runs through April 25th, a fortunately long life that will give thousands of art lovers a chance to see some of the finest work in MOMA's collection. Abstract Expressionist New York is as close to perfect as an exhibition gets, (See photo collection from the Abstract Expressionist Show below.) staying neatly within its boundaries and showing the great variety and individualism that guided its creators. Abstract Expressionist New York consumes the entire forth floor at MOMA, but don't worry about an exhausting explosion of works. This exhibit is neatly curated and avoids the excesses and overreaching of other major presentations.

Note: This great show has closed, but the article and pictures from the show will remain as an active archive. DJS

For a comprehensive New York City perspective, see: New York City 365

For an interesting story of this time from a different point of view: When Art Dallied With Poetry on 53rd Street

Abstract Expressionist New York

Following a recent, economy driven trend, MOMA has drawn the artworks in this show from its own collection, one extensive enough that much of it is rarely seen, giving visitors a chance to linger over such art lover treats as a room filled with nothing but the paintings of Mark Rothko, the expressionist recently depicted on Broadway in Red.

We're fortunate that MOMA's collection is outstanding and extensive. The curator, Ann Temkin, probably couldn't lose but did a magnificent job anyway. A not as much realized advantage is that much of expressionist art is huge. Jackson Pollack's One eats up most of a wall by itself. What this does though is allow the curator to show fewer pictures, not having to fill the space with others that, while maybe great, risk overloading viewers with too much of a good thing. As most visitors who come to New York City and see this show will only get a single opportunity to stroll the galleries, this maximizes the experience without exhausting the senses.

Here is what they will see.

A lot of familiar and not so familiar work from painters they know. Mark Rothko is well represented, more so than anyone besides Jackson Pollack. The many Rothko works shown, including an entire roomful, go from early to very late and from sunny to passionate to very cold. The concluding work in the last major room is Rothko's, and it is all grays and blacks, painted in the year before his death by suicide.

Pollack provides the show's highest energy, his drip paintings displaying a vigor, complexity and style unmatched in its maturity by that of anyone else. I still marvel at how truly his most memorable works visually reflect the theoretical concepts of energy fields proposed by quantum physics. Pollack made it look easy.

Barnett Newman, probably the wittiest of all the expressionists, once dismissed the respectable world of art collectors and critics by remarking that esthetics was to him "like ornithology is to the birds." He couldn't care less, and his intuitively powered works show it. Like Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell, he seemed not care at all about what buyers wanted, guided by his own powerful inspirations and intellect.

While the New York Times reviewer, Roberta Smith, nitpicks about male dominance in the world of abstract expressionism and, consequently in this show, I can't recall another non-gender themed major art show with a greater representation of women. You certainly won't find it among the impressionists or, God forbid, in centuries earlier when a genius, Camille Claudel, was allowed to do the feet in Rodin's great sculptures.

Joan Mitchel, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan are represented with master works masterworks that have no trouble playing in the same game as the boys. Hartigan's painting, Shinnecock Canal, is unforgettable. Unlike other painters of the time, each of these women had long, productive careers, although Krasner is often overshadowed by Pollack to whom she was married until his early death–which Rothko, by the way, called a suicide. Frankenthaler may be the only artist in this show still living.

A lesser known by favorite painter of mine, Hans Hoffman, shares space in a later room with Willem de Kooning, presences near the end of the show that help steady the brilliance sustained from the beginning.

The duration of this show, into mid-sprint of 2011, is a gift. A New Yorker, I will return many times and absorb favorite works. Consistent with the great and gentle good taste the curator showed in her selection and placement of works, Ann Temkin's notes on the show placed at intervals on the walls of the galleries are studies in simplicity, almost as if determined not to butt heads with those hard-driving expressionists, the ghosts of whom must be wandering the galleries now.

Additional side galleries feature some photography and related, but lesser works, for the more hardy and ambitious. They will probably be less crowded too.

Abstract Expressionist New York is on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, situated in Midtown on West 54th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. If you're in the city, don't miss it.