Selected Exhibition Reviews, Whitney Museum of American Art, Spring 2000 to Spring 2004

 

The 2000 Biennial

“Finally the Whitney Biennial does everything everyone always complained it failed to do. It has curators on intimate terms with art being made outside New York . It has unexpected work by unfamiliar names, artists of color, and foreign-born artists. It's not weighted with the predictable biggies, doesn't play footsie with the art dealers, even makes a case for painting in a range of idiosyncratic modes from compulsively figurative to explosively abstract. It's more intelligently installed than usual and stands up to the challenge of P.S. 1's hardly flawless Greater New York . What more could we ask?…Up pop the usual gripes about missing artists, unmemorable work, lack of theme. Never mind that hardly ever are there more than a handful of truly memorable works in any big survey…And when did a Whitney Biennial ever have a theme? But that's not the point, nor is the fact that this one is better and fresher than most. The point is that no matter what this Biennial did, the local heavies wouldn't want to like it. The source of the pique is not really the art. It's the meta-narrative: This bad guy from beyond, a suave art historian, no less – let's call him Mad Max – came galloping into town, stormed the fortress, routed the rightful occupants, and hijacked the Biennial. Even more unforgivable, he reinvented it in the image of the show we always wished it was…”

-- Kim Levin, The Village Voice, April 11, 2000

 

Alice Neel

“These portraits, which usually feature family members or denizens of the art world, are frequently great and always marvelously loquacious. Color, shape, and brushwork, along with Neel's signature distortions of body and face, all have their say, and both the painterly process and the human psyche are repeatedly laid bare. Neel, never less than interesting and always striving, operated in the gap between the Stieglitz circle and the Abstract Expressionists with a fruitfulness matched only by Stuart Davis; like his late work, hers is an indelible part of the postwar period.”

-- Roberta Smith, The New York Times, June 30, 2000

“The way Alice Neel rides the edge of something primitive in her work, the physicalness of her process, her alternately agitated and mangy surfaces, her breathtaking brushstrokes, and the hypersensitive obsessiveness of her portraits suggest Neel ranks among the greatest American painters of the 20 th century…This is a great opportunity to get acquainted with a marvelously gnarly artist…This exhibition does much in the way of furthering Neel the artist. Most of all, it does what good shows do: leaves us wanting more.”

-- Jerry Saltz, The Village Voice , July 25, 2000

“An unprecedented celebration of Neel's work.”

-- Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair, July 2000

“Neel awakened the dormant genre of portraiture as much as did her contemporaries Andy Warhol and Chuck Close…this is a surprising and mind-exercising exhibition overall, rich with immediate and delayed pleasures.”

-- Jeff Weinstein, Artforum, September 2000

 

Barbara Kruger

“An overdue retrospective reveals Barbara Kruger as a visionary who uses Madison Avenue techniques to subvert Madison Avenue values… Eager to reach out to the unconverted, she creates art that, with insight and wit, prods people to consider how and why they love and hate…It's about time Kruger, who is 55, was given a retrospective.”

-- Michael Brenson, New York, July 31, 2000

“It's hardly a surprise to be told that every good artist creates a world of her or his own. But to move from the world of Alice Neel to that of Barbara Kruger (separated by a single floor at the Whitney Museum) is to feel you have moved from one species to another, from people who claim their individuality as a natural right to people who see the world as one big central casting agency in which everyone, not least themselves, is a desirable or an undesirable type…Looking at the work of these women makes me think artists worry too much about being ahead of their time. Maybe the hardest thing of all is to be a real part of one's time, to take it in with all the courage and imagination one can muster.”

-- Margo Jefferson, The New York Times, September 4, 2000

 

Edward Hopper, Printmaker

“Before concentrating on paintings, Hopper made prints from 1913 to 1923. In that decade he produced his first mature work, a wonderful body of etchings that brought realism, emotion and a strong sense of the medium's potential to a field that had become more decorative than challenging…The nearly 50 works here are a fine introduction to Hopper's basic themes and give a splendid idea of what he accomplished.”

-- Grace Glueck, The New York Times, July 7, 2000

 

The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought: Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America 1930-2000

“…the rich programming in the Whitney's series is ambitious, ample, and ecstatic…Uniting some of the most beautifully fleeting and flickering images of the last 70 years, The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought resists nostalgic impulses, declaring that film refuses to give up the ghost.”

-- Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice, September 5, 2000

 

Edward Steichen

“Refinement and savvy naturally made him the greatest fashion-celebrity photographer ever. Steichen's icons…are masterstrokes of surface effect reflecting, above all, him...He was at the beginning a gifted painter…and also a talent scout, a kind of brilliant roving eye, who, as much as Stieglitz if not more, was responsible for introducing European modernism to America at the start of the century…Steichen saw everything from his Olympian perch, the master of all he surveyed, high and low…a restless, benign, flawed perfectionist.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, October 6, 2000

“It's been 40 years since the last retrospective of his work, an event he organized himself, and a whole slew of orthodoxies has crumbled since then. In retrospect, Steichen's penchant for fudging boundaries makes him a post-modernist prophet, a belatedly fascinating figure in our rapidly crossbreeding world.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, October 8, 2000

“If this fine show proves anything, it's the existence of a kind of idiosyncratic continuity throughout Steichen's work: for his detractors, it might be a homogenous technical craftsmanship that plays out in many media; but for his fans, it's an ever-present, soulful beauty.”

-- Sarah Schmerler, Time Out New York, November 9-16, 2000

 

Sol LeWitt

“ Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective , at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives New Yorkers their first comprehensive look in more than two decades at one of postwar American art's most rigorous and generous figures…In LeWitt's compellingly modernist work, reason can be a pathway to the irrational and the ecstatic; and the most reduced visual language can provide access to fundamental desires and questions. In a moment of unbridled museum spectacle, a show of such richly thoughtful, hard-to-market work is particularly welcome.”

-- Michael Brenson, New York, September 11, 2000

“I don't know what to tell you if you fail to get some kick out of the Sol LeWitt retrospective at the Whitney. Hands down it is the most beautiful exhibition by a living artist in a New York museum in a long time, an antidote to the nonsense on view in several other museums around town, a rebuttal to soreheads saying there's never serious contemporary art around anymore, and also a digestible, brightly colored package just in time for the holidays. The perfect gift for the city that has everything except enough shows like this one.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, December 8, 2000

“LeWitt has enlarged art and demonstrated that the sparest and most didactic of means can yield some of the richest results…No wonder the LeWitt visitors were so absorbed in the wall drawings. Despite displaying an artist whose career championed the role of pure thought in art, the exhibition awakened them to that most fundamental aspect of the museum experience: the primacy of looking .”

-- Eric Gibson, Wall Street Journal, January 2001

“As his knockout retrospective at the Whitney Museum makes clear, LeWitt's come a long way…not only by humanizing minimalism but also by pioneering conceptual art. Anyone interested in American art should see it.”

-- Jo Ann Lewis, The Washington Post, January 7, 2001

 

Flashing into the Shadows: The Artist's Film in America 1966-1976

“The artist's film of the ‘60s and ‘70s has been relatively neglected...A much-needed corrective, Flashing Into the Shadows elucidated the importance of film in the work of Joan Jonas, Robert Morris, and Dan Graham, among others. At a time when museums are under pressure to present crowd-pleasing extravaganzas, curators Chrissie Iles and Eric de Bruyn pulled off a contemporary show of clear focus and impeccable quality at a major institution.”

-- James Meyer, Artforum, December 2001

The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust by Vik Muniz

“Muniz…ratchets things up yet another notch with these Pictures of Dust …The results are dead-on brilliant and weirdly ravishing to behold. Using the flimsiest of materials, Muniz manages to suggest both depth and weight…”

-- Vince Aletti, The Village Voice, February 7, 2001

 

Kenneth Josephson

“One of the earliest and most inventive explorers of the medium's character and the issues of perception and representation that it raises is Kenneth Josephson, whose first full-scale career assessment is at the Whitney.”

-- Vicki Goldberg, The New York Times, March 2, 2001

“A testament to the resources of the form. This full-scale retrospective makes a forceful case for the inventiveness of the artist, who comes across as a shutterbug version of Donald Barthelme.”

-- The New Yorker, March 5, 2001

“What a treat! A man with a sense of humor and a sense of awe, Josephson contrived some of the most beckoning brainteasers of postmodernism…When an anonymous arm holds up a Polaroid of clouds against a cloudless sky, all certainties about certainty are gently undone.”

-- Richard Lacayo, Time, March 12, 2001

 

BitStreams and Data Dynamics

“ BitStreams is the Whitney's adventurous effort to present the latest in computer-generated art. Rather than subject the museumgoer to a gallery full of monitors with artist websites to navigate ad nauseum , curator Lawrence Rinder presents an impressive selection of digital work that should appeal to techies and Luddites alike…What will happen once the novelty of new media wears off? Time will tell, but the Whitney has admirably set the (digital) clock in motion.”

-- Katie Clifford, ARTnews, June 2001

“The companion digital shows now at the Whitney, BitStreams and Data Dynamics …will be remembered as pioneering surveys of the new technological age in art…And there is no denying the inevitability and multiple implications of the big message here, which we discount at the risk of sheer stupidity: Technology is changing how artists, especially young ones, make all types of art and, in turn, how we experience it…A new world.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, March 23, 2001

 

Mies in America

“Even people who hate modern architecture…can have a soft spot for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the most steadfast Modernist of them all…There couldn't be a better time to look back fully on Mies.”

-- Richard Lacayo, Time, June 25, 2001

“Perhaps you think you know all there is to know about the late, great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe…But two new exhibitions here simultaneously broaden and deepen our understanding…Along the way, they lend fresh perspective to the buildings and ideas of a site-sensitive architect…The Mies that emerges…is far more complex and contradictory than the heroic, tunnel-vision modernist that Mies' advocates – and Mies himself – have traditionally portrayed.”

-- Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2001

“Potently rewarding and demanding…One comes away…with a profound sense of the poetic fire and infallible taste that animated this man, who famously opined, “God is in the details.”

-- James Gardner, New York Post, June 21, 2001

“Rather than repackaging this great German modernist as a field marshal of reason, obsessed with compressing all of human existence into uniform, three-dimensional grids, these two shows depict Mies as a supervisor of fantasy: an interpreter of the 20 th century's deepest dream of itself…”

-- Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times, June 22, 2001

 

Wayne Thiebaud

“The American artists to whom he is closest are Edward Hopper and his fellow Californian, the late great Richard Diebenkorn; among Europeans, the names Giorgio Morandi, Chardin and Manet are among the first to pop up…Thiebaud is one of the few American artists whose ambitions have no Puritan or didactic dimension – he wants to give pleasure but in a serious and considered way, and he does.”

-- Robert Hughes, Time, July 16, 2001

“If a future historian were to look back at our time and say of Warhol's deadpan style, ‘This was America,' another historian could point to the warmer vision of Thiebaud and say, no less truthfully, ‘This, too'…This is a good show for both adults and children to see – not just because of the visual pastry on display but because Thiebaud, a highly sophisticated artist, brings such a wonderful ‘Gee whiz' to art…You can no longer think seriously about American places and things without thinking of him.”

-- Mark Stevens, New York, July 16, 2001

“If the world were a perfect place, the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective that has just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art would be nailed to the walls for good and we would be free to stop by whenever we needed to remind ourselves what happiness feels like. Mr. Thiebaud's work is…about the fact that the world never was and still isn't perfect, except perhaps one little part of it, to which we can briefly retreat via these paintings and glimpse the way all things ought to be.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, June 29, 2001

Alex Katz: Small Paintings

“Mr. Katz may have made his mark as a big-picture painter, but a gorgeous, 50-year survey of his small paintings divided between the Whitney and its midtown satellite displays the gifts of a natural-born intimist.”

-- Ken Johnson, The New York Times, November 16, 2001

 

Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977

“Considering how amnesiac the art world is, this exhibition deserves credit…as an act of historical rectitude, recovering pioneering examples of experimental film, video, slide projections and even holography from an era before anybody heard of Bill Viola or Sam Taylor-Wood...The exhibition is especially admirable for reminding us of artists overlooked by a public focused more on stars.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, October 19 and November 16, 2001

“The show is a trove of…wonders, capsules from an extraordinarily fertile period, when inspiration struck freely and fiercely and everybody had a lot of time for art.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, October 21, 2001

“The exhibition, curated by Chrissie Iles, is one of the best to happen in New York in years. It sheds some light on our current entrepreneurial endgame by referring back to its ice age: that time during the ‘70s when the same sort of electronic images that were just beginning to permeate our collective consciousness were first permitted a place alongside traditional art objects.”

-- Tim Griffin, Time Out New York, November 22-29, 2001 ; also cited as one of 2001's best shows, January 3-10, 2002

 

Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence

“ Over the Line catches Lawrence 's rhythm of shaping and fitting and his deliberate, carpentered grace…A career that can seem almost too well known ends up delivering surprises.”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, November 9, 2001

“We knew that Lawrence 's colors were bold, his narratives stark. But the Whitney opens up other dimensions of his accomplishment…This omnibus exhibit spans seven decades, and chronicles Lawrence 's epic struggle to give visual form not only to the African-American experience, but to the human striving for freedom and social justice. It makes a piquant contrast with the Norman Rockwell retrospective now at the Guggenheim Museum , which chronicles the same charged period, but from the other side of the racial divide…Where Rockwell contented himself with sentiment, Lawrence reached for revelation.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, November 12, 2001

“Visitors to the Whitney Museum of American Art's superb Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence stand before the canvases with eyes wide, mouths agape, hands playing at their throats, awestruck…they realize they're in the presence of one of the great artists of the 20th century.”

-- Georgette Gouveia, The Journal News, January 6, 2002

 

Paul Pfeiffer

“With his tightly controlled fusion of found images and new technology, Mr. Pfeiffer has carved out distinctive territory, and with the golden weight of the Bucksbaum Award still on him, he's sticking to it in this show. The hands-on, hands-off format he's developed…is clearly a fertile one. And like Andy Warhol, whom he is said to admire, he seems to know that he has the whole abject, visionary spectrum of American popular culture as raw material.”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, January 18, 2002

 

Irving Penn

“In… Dancer , Penn elevates the body, but not cheaply or easily, as fashion does. He begins with the real human clay and renders it with unflinching directness…these very real bodies slowly grow in the imagination, until they are transfigured.”

-- Mark Stevens, New York, February 4, 2002

“These images…testify to Penn's amazing capacity for self-renewal, for his ability to retain, through the decades, a youthful ebullience of experimentation equaled by few, if any, of his peers…Few American masters have more wisely nurtured their talent, more judiciously stoked their inspirational fire.”

-- Francine du Plessix Gray, Vogue, February 2002

 

The 2002 Biennial

“Everyone said the last biennial was very American, referring to its melting-pot inclusiveness. The 2002 Biennial, almost entirely shaped before Sept. 11, is American in a different way, one that has absolutely nothing to do with patriotism but has at least something to do with a spiritual history, from the transcendentalist 19 th century to the psychedelic 60's to the standing-here-wondering now…In the 1970's and 80's, the biennial was a promotional event for New York art, or rather for five or six Manhattan galleries and a gatekeeping retinue of curators, collectors and critics. This year's show, organized by an all-Whitney team led by Lawrence R. Rinder, the museum's curator of contemporary art, takes the opposite tack…”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, March 8, 2002

“The 2002 Whitney Biennial…is less a profile of the art world than it is a view of America as a vast archipelago of subcultures; it takes the nation's wartime temperature when an era of niche marketing and a thousand television channels makes the task daunting…This show has the fanatic's soul and speaks to a peculiarly American subjectivity, the kind that continually strives to create a new sense of self. Which is the best thing a Biennial could do at this moment…”

-- Tim Griffin, Time Out New York, March 14-21, 2002

“An impressive assortment of fascinating objects and experiences…Rinder writes in his introduction to the catalog that ‘it is imperative that we have the courage to look deeply, and critically, into our national character.' But if his excellent biennial demonstrates anything, it's that this critical looking can start by staring down the whole idea that such a single character exists...As this biennial suggests, it's possible simply to enjoy all the very varied excellences that this land produces, and leave national mythmaking to other countries.”

-- Blake Gopnik, The Washington Post, March 7, 2002

“So what kind of Whitney Biennial is this? A very satisfying one, as it turns out…This year's edition of the Whitney Museum's periodic examination of contemporary art consolidates and explicates but doesn't agitate…It offers a sensible, beautifully installed, well-balanced scan of what's going on in all media…Rinder's production is marked by both its seriousness and by its sense of proportion. It's big, but doesn't feel so; it's youthful in spirit, yet mature in character. In short, it strikes the best possible balance between being hip and being thoughtful.”

-- Edward J. Sozanski, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 17, 2002

“It's…possible that Rinder has gotten it just right…what he is showing is a cultural moment in which the idea of art has been stretched so far beyond what we've grown comfortable with in recent years that it's almost unrecognizable. One gets the feeling these artists are in total revolt not only against the art of the past but also against the art world of the present as well.”

-- Glenn McNatt, The Baltimore Sun, April 14, 2002

“The Whitney deserves considerable credit for exposing itself to critical onslaughts from various directions in this periodic effort to bring the present art world to consciousness. Art really is a mirror in which the culture gets to see itself reflected, but it requires a fair amount of risk and bickering to get that image to emerge with any degree of clarity. As it happens, my own sense of the state of the art world is reasonably congruent with that of Lawrence Rinder…I found the wall texts, like the catalogue, indispensable…I think well of Biennial 2002…Take my word that it is worth the effort.”

-- Arthur C. Danto, The Nation, April 29, 2002

 

Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen

“Drawings, brilliantly rendered in the cheerfully loose yet energetic Oldenburg style that gives inanimate objects a kind of body language…Mr. Oldenburg…is one of the most original draftsmen around. His startling ability to perceive subtle visual relationships and to morph objects from one incarnation or state to another has produced an innovative, visionary world, a witty one that not only enlivens and entertains, but has also generated new notions of what sculpture can be.”

-- Grace Glueck, The New York Times, June 28, 2002

 

Joan Mitchell

“This dense, dazzling retrospective of works confirms that Mitchell was not just the best of the so-called second-generation Abstract Expressionists – a status already hers by common consent – but a great modern artist who started strong and improved with age. Her work at the Whitney makes it hard to imagine why anyone would want to paint other than abstractly, reveling in the liberty and purity of oils wielded with articulate passion…There isn't a wrong note in her cadenzas – only a swarm of piquant, fugitive grace notes falling like loose change. “

-- Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, July 15, 2002

“The Whitney, which in 1974 was the first American museum to give her a major show, has now mounted a powerful retrospective of her work…the paintings make a strong case for her inclusion in the pantheon of Abstract Expressionist masters. Arranged chronologically, the canvases show a progress from inspired lyricism to a more abrasive, savage spirit.”

-- Howard Kissel, Daily News, June 21, 2002

“Passion…seems to leap from the canvases of Joan Mitchell, whose paintings sometimes meld the most sensuous of colors with violent, slashing brushstrokes. In other works, the palette is austere, and the pigment applied with painstaking delicacy. Such is the range of this greatly underestimated artist, who only now, a decade after her death, receives her due in a retrospective at the Whitney.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, June 30, 2002

“I'll probably be going back and back to the Joan Mitchell show at the Whitney this summer to get another shot of pleasure. The impact of her works, especially the later ones, is so immediately intoxicating that a natural reaction is to distrust the art…Distrust your distrust...Tales of Mitchell's troubled personality indirectly lend these objects of instant joy a hint of gravitas…Mitchell's work, over time growing ripe…leaves its own mark after your eyes let it go.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, July 5, 2002

“For the art world, this exhibition should be news…For Mitchell, a painting could still encompass the grand passions…Educated, smart, knowing, and sophisticated, she was somehow innocent of irony and not afraid to celebrate pleasure; the sublime intoxications that earlier societies once respected she claimed for her own.”

-- Mark Stevens, New York, July 15, 2002

“The cult of personality looms large in this exhibition, which headlines an unusually strong crop of exhibitions at the Whitney this summer.”

-- Martha Schwendener, Artforum, Summer 2002

“Abstract art does not get more ravishing than the best of the works in this exhibition…”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, selecting show as one of the year's ten best exhibitions, December 29, 2002

 

Visions from America : Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art 1940-2001

“Although we've had a chance to see key elements of the Whitney's photography holdings since the museum began collecting seriously in the early ‘90s, this is the first big survey drawn entirely from that collection. With more than 140 works, the show might be difficult to digest in one viewing, but its broad inclusiveness is held in check by Sylvia Wolf's witty, discerning curatorial eye…Best of all, despite the profusion of work and dizzying variety of formats, nearly every photo stands out and speaks to the depth, intelligence, and coherence of the collection as a whole.”

-- Vince Aletti, The Village Voice, July 9, 2002

 

Jack Goldstein

“A treasure trove of art that breaks the Minimalist mold.”

-- Martha Schwendener, Artforum, Summer 2002

“Beyond their political content…the sheer beauty of Goldstein's ‘70s films constantly forces one to remember that, even when he deploys the strategies of spectacle ironically, Goldstein is a talented visual artist. That these works still look so fresh testifies not only to his refined aesthetic sensibility, but also to his influence on many of today's artists…”

-- Jordan Kantor, Artforum, December 2002

Michal Rovner

“A magical retrospective.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, August 2, 2002

“The first masterpiece completed under the impress of Sept. 11 is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's mid-career review for Michal Rovner, the international photographer, film and video artist…Rovner has succeeded in her video installations beyond what anyone could have expected. Current events certainly have given the work timeliness, but the highest achievement in this…unsettling exhibition comes from how the installations step out of time to touch upon states at once terrible and eternal.”

-- Alan G. Artner, Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2002

“Michal Rovner's swoony images of intractable real-world problems have angered some viewers. On balance that seems like a good thing…Given the deafening level of empty rhetoric in current politics, committed attention to plain fact seems something like an ethical imperative. But facts, alas, are often messy, even blurry, and Rovner's focus on unstable boundary zones, whether they're between Israel and Lebanon or bombers and birds, is paradoxically resolute…the languorous seductions of her work are extremely hard to resist.”

-- Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, March 2003

" Last year, photographer and video artist Michal Rovner was given a full-dress exhibition at the Whitney Museum. An entire floor was devoted to her video images and photographs of haunting, silhouetted figures, mostly of birds and men, engaged in crowded flight patterns or trudging through barren landscapes. Each of her creatures seems oddly alone, even in large groupings. Rovner's camera gives them dignity in a theatrical sort of way, as if some of Cecil B. DeMille's background minions were suddenly put center-frame.

"The New York critics didn't go for it. Reviewers dismissed her as not ready for such a major survey, or lumped her with 'digital artists' who are thought to be more science than substance. Rovner's big break on Madison Avenue fizzled.

Fast-forward to this summer's Venice Biennale, and it seems that perhaps the critics were the ones who weren't ready. At every Biennale a buzz develops about a certain pavilion early on during the press preview and lines start to form. In 2001 it was Germany and Canada. This time around it was Israel. Rovner, whose main studio is in New York, was representing her native country. People came by the hundreds to see that strange and beautiful installation in the Israeli pavilion. By all rights, it should have won a prize -- though it was a commonplace in Venice that geopolitical events made such an award impossible.

"Walking into her installation feels like a once-in-a-lifetime revelation....Rovner's media art is like no other. She stands alone in the pure and artful way she bends digital technology to suit her own vision. She makes of these tools fine materials like the smoothest of marble or the supplest of paints."

--Michael Rush, Artnet, June 2003

 

riverrun: Film and Video Projections on the Holland Tunnel Ventilation Building, presented with Minetta Brook

“ Riverrun is a win-win viewing experience…The often-majestic images flickering across the building's flat brick façade include rivers, cranes, buildings, bridges, ships and barges. Soon everything starts to knit together. Art's distillation and the world's grand immediacy collaborate to form an almost elegiac meditation on nature, on its beauty and power, its challenge to human ingenuity and its comforting constancy in the face of life's fragility.”

-- Roberta Smith, The New York Times, September 25, 2002

 

An American Legacy, A Gift to New York

“The trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art recently did something smart. They pooled their pennies, acquired $200 million worth of postwar art and gave the whole shebang – 87 works – to the museum at once. That made it a big-bang gift, the kind that generates buzz, institutional optimism and, I'm sure it is hoped, further private largess. The gift enhances and subtly reshapes the museum's account of mid- to late-20 th century Modernism in ways that will become clearer as the individual pieces are integrated into the collection…”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, October 25, 2002

“The 87 works from 23 artists represent a stunning panorama of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and other avant-garde styles associated with the New York art scene since the late 1940s…”

-- David Minthorn, Associated Press, October 23, 2002

“The current gift includes significant works by many of the best-known artists of the postwar period…and sends the signal that the Whitney intends to do what's necessary to put together a comprehensive collection of postwar 20 th -century American art…What makes American Legacy seem so promising…is its proximity to the rest of the Whitney's permanent collection, notably the installation of earlier American art on the upper floor and the recently opened survey De Kooning to Today: Highlights from the Permanent Collection . If you put these three collections together in your mind's eye, you will have an exciting first glimmer of the museum that the Whitney will eventually become when it moves into a larger space…”

-- Mark Stevens, New York, November 18, 2002

 

The Quilts of Gee's Bend

“ America is a nation of quilters—20 million of them, in fact, which is probably more than the number of people who go to see exhibitions of modern art in museums. But quilters and modern-art fans need not be mutually exclusive groups, especially when they could be joyfully united by The Quilts of Gee's Bend …The quilts in the show are no less the equals—in unconventional color, bold and surprising composition, and subtle visual invention—of just about any abstract painting made by any trained artist living in one of the world's great cities…”

-- Peter Plagens, Newsweek, November 18, 2002

“The most ebullient exhibition of the New York art season has arrived at the Whitney Museum in the unlikely guise of a show of hand-stitched quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala…They provided comfort and warmth, piled on top of cornshuck mattresses or layered six or seven deep for the cold nights. But they also became declarations of style, flags of independence hung to dry on wire lines for the neighbors or anyone else to see. The results, not incidentally, turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation…The best of these designs, usually minimalist and spare, are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them….This may be the last moment to record and celebrate what is one of the country's most idiosyncratic and vivid living art traditions. There are many other artful quiltmakers around the nation. But there is nothing that has turned up yet quite akin to what's here.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, November 29, 2002 (also selected as one of the year's ten best exhibitions, December 29, 2002 )

“If you see one exhibit this holiday season, the Whitney Museum 's Quilts of Gee's Bend should be it. A collection of 60-odd quilts from a remote corner of Alabama , the show has everything going for it: fantastic art, profound humanity and a spectacular installation.”
-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, December 1, 2002

“A joy…The quilts are a triumph of creativity…Sophisticated, confident and sensual, this is terrific art. It should be recognized, along with so many musical forms, as one of the important contributions that African-Americans have made to the larger culture.'

-- Catherine Fox, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 2, 2003

 

Sanctuaries: The Last Works of John Hejduk

“Adopting biomorphic forms, he moved his work more toward painting and sculpture, bringing to it at the end a personal, spiritual dimension far from the pragmatic demands of the market…Think outside the box was Hejduk's mandate for himself and his students. And if you look at his projects as ends in themselves rather than works that demand to be built, you will find that liberating.”

-- Grace Glueck, The New York Times, December 20, 2002

 

Tom Burr: Deep Purple

“Its bold shape reiterates the stark geometry of Marcel Breuer's brutalist architecture; its smooth purple surface contrasts beautifully with the courtyard's mottled concrete walls…”

-- Margaret Sundell, Time Out New York, January 2-9, 2003

 

Mark Hansen/Ben Rubin: Listening Post

“While the purpose of Listening Post is to give us a window into the thicket of mass communication via the Internet, its real power as a work of art stems from something larger—the way it shows how cyberspace has redefined the idea of ‘landscape' in art…The same impulses that move a viewer of landscapes are operative here—which is just one of the many reasons for the sense Listening Post gives of being poised between two worlds, one old and one new. In this contrast lies its power as a work of art.”

-- Eric Gibson, Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2003

“Nothing becomes a new technology more than aesthetic restraint and an impressive artistic pedigree. Listening Post …has both. Descending from the work of John Cage, Philip Glass, and Jenny Holzer, and graced by a handsome Minimalist presentation, it operates in the gaps between art, entertainment, and documentary; it is almost irresistible, like magic.”
-- Roberta Smith, The New York Times, February 21, 2003

 

The Kids are Alright: Photographs by Ryan McGinley

“It's not all that often that an artist makes his New York solo exhibition debut in the august galleries of the Whitney...Mr. McGinley's approach to sexuality is one of the interesting things about his work…However the work develops, it is refreshing to encounter, as we seem to, artists operating outside the mainstream of the art world itself, where volatile energies—aesthetic and political—are too often stroked into craftsy, resistance-free acceptability. It would be great if that process proved to be not all right with these kids.”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, February 14, 2003

“Ryan McGinley is featured in the Whitney's current First Exposure series. His photographs of youthful Manhattanites have attracted a growing number of buyers, such as Sir Elton John, who bought seven of his works. They are reminiscent of the more well-known photographer Nan Goldin's work…but where Ms. Goldin infuses her images with snapshot despair, Mr. McGinley conveys exuberance and hope.”

-- Robert J. Hughes, The Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2003

 

Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio

“The search for intelligent life in architecture is artfully rewarded at the Whitney Museum 's retrospective of the work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, New York 's brainiest architectural team…Our time has been rich in cross-disciplinary encounters between art, architecture, photography, fashion, and computer imaging. Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio are the major connectors. No one has conducted traffic between these productive zones more skillfully than they have…Actually this work is one of the biggest deals architecture has seen in a long, long time. What we are seeing here is comparable in significance to the first glimpses of the New Objectivity, the Spartan style that preceded the formation of the Bauhaus… Scanning is a show in which many New York architects will take pride as well as pleasure. A couple of genuine, MacArthur Foundation-certified geniuses have come through…Like Mr. Koolhaas, Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio have earned our attention honestly, each amazing step along the way.”

-- Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times, February 28, 2003

“As it turns out, the work of Diller + Scofidio is a tantalizing blend of creativity and critique. The firm's output over two decades is ingenious, perceptive, and somewhat insidious – Diller + Scofidio do not so much attack the status quo as offer oblique commentary. Their work is aberrant, but not too aberrant…the show gives broad exposure to a provocative and deserving body of work.”

-- Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Post, March 30, 2003

“Their best architecture is breathtaking and thrillingly disorienting.”

-- Ariella Budick, Newsday, March 28, 2003

“The husband-and-wife architects Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio are usually thought of as conceptual artists whose main subject is a critique of architecture and its bourgeois conventions, but their retrospective at the Whitney is so beautiful that you're inclined to rank them as architects first and social critics second…What gives the installation its power is the way the robots' glass case looks elegant, and as monumental, as anything designed by Mies van der Rohe.”

-- Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker, March 17, 2003

“This is a high-IQ show that delights in its combination of cutting humor, strangeness and insight.”

-- Joseph Giovannini, New York Magazine, March 17, 2003

 

 

Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life

“A marvelous retrospective…I thought that the 1975 Nadelman retrospective at the Whitney…was a great exhibition, but I believe the new retrospective, organized by Barbara Haskell, gives us an even greater, more sympathetic account of his achievement, and the book-length monograph…is also exemplary in every respect…Ms. Haskell has succeeded, through extensive research and a serious reconsideration of many issues in Nadelman's career, in casting fresh light on both the work and the life of this extraordinary artist.”

-- Hilton Kramer, The New York Observer, April 21, 2003

“While retaining the linear grace of classicism, he began making witty and sometimes satirical sculptures of archetypal figures…They have a flapper insouciance…It was in these genre figures that Nadelman synthesized the classical and the contemporary in a way that now looks original. And it was here that he made his strongest claim to a major place in American art. He always had a distinctive visual style – a sinuous line that's formally interesting – and his art kept evolving until his death…his unexpected last works – made in despair and never presented to the world of money and prestige – are actually his most affecting. Beautifully unpolished and fragmentary, these rough figures, at once ancient and fresh, offer an implicit criticism of perfected elegance. In Nadelman's end was a beginning.”

-- Mark Stevens, New York Magazine, April 21, 2003

“The retrospective of sculptor Elie Nadelman's lyrical work may be this season's great rediscovery…As modernist tendencies flourish, the shapes grow increasingly stylized, sometimes refined to their very essence. Works devoid of anthropomorphic detail achieve astonishing expression using only mass and shape. What makes Nadelman's work feel timely and timeless is the Polish expatriate's mingling of art's rich legacy with everyday life…His late figurines circa World War II bear an existential weight via encrusted plaster. As these toppled miniatures lie clustered on a tabletop, we gaze down, transfixed witnesses.”

-- John Masterson, Citysearch, April 10, 2003

 

The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003

"A witty survey of art about the United States ... America is rendered in the eyes of its beholders as both the last utopia and the root cause of the world's economic, social and military disasters.  Both, but what is surprising about this carefully chosen and thematically ambitious survey is the eloquence and subtlety of so much of the art."

-- Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times, July 13, 2003

"A stimulating and sometimes shocking show...much of it seems relevant in the lingering aftershock of 9/11."

-- Grace Glueck, The New York Times, July 4, 2003

“The exhibit is a timely attempt to hold up a mirror to Americans and help them see themselves as others do.”

-- Michael Z. Wise, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2003

“While timing isn't everything when it comes to museum exhibitions – content counts, too, after all – it would be hard to ignore the nearly perfect timing of The American Effect , the new Whitney Museum show that explores how America is seen by artists around the world.”

-- Karin Lipson, Newsday, July 8, 2003

“The Whitney Museum of American Art has strategically transcended its mandate to show only American art, and has done so in a tough, serious, funny, intelligent, biting, sometimes startling, and absolutely relevant exhibition that lets us see our nation as others see us. This isn't just an important exhibition. At a moment when Uncle Sam seems to be morphing into Godzilla, it's a necessary one.”

-- Kim Levin, The Village Voice, July 30- August 5, 2003

"This exhibition underlines the acuity of curator Lawrence Rinder, who also assembled last year's similarly lively, eye-opening and heterogeneous Whitney Biennial. About one in five of his selections, on both occasions, said nothing to me. But he has made himself the most astute, adventurous and omniverous talent scout in the world of contemporary art."

--David Littlejohn, The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2003

"The American Effect" at the Whitney Museum was simply one of the finest museum shows of any year, a serious look at American popular culture and how its free-wheeling style -- particularly American liberalism, individualism, and free-market economics -- led to such hostile acts as the World Trade Center attack. One sculpture in particular, showing American super heroes as aged nursing home denizens, has stuck in the mind like glue.
--Dan Bischoff, The Newark Star-Ledger, December 29, 2003

 

Beside the Rose: Jay DeFeo

NYT's best exhibitions of 2003: No. 8  "The current pocket-size Whitney show of the Bay Area legend Jay DeFeo is a reminder of what giving your life for art means. Her "Rose," an icon of late Abstract Expressionism and Beat art, with nearly a ton of accumulated paint, is a virtual sculpture and an enduring artifact of intractable will."

--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, December 28, 2003

 

John Currin

NYT's best exhibitions of 2003:   No. 5  " John Currin's contentious midcareer survey now at the Whitney serves up low-down humor, heartless kitsch and ironic smut with dollops of finesse and brains. Mr. Currin paints in a suave and malevolent vein, with increasing skill. When you leave the show, people on the street suddenly look as if they had stepped out of his work."

--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, December 28, 2003

 

Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraiture of Lucas Samaras

 " Self-absorption, self-depiction, self-revelation? Well, we all look at ourselves in elevator mirrors but for most people, that's it. Yet for artist Lucas Samaras, self- portraiture in all its forms has been a driving force for almost 50 years resulting in thousands of weird and wonderful images, photographs, boxes, constructions, 400 of which make up his remarkable exhibition, Unrepentant Ego , at New York's Whitney Museum."

-- Clare Henry, Financial Times, December 30 2003

 

Irit Batsry: Set

"The jury at the Whitney Museum of American Art knew what it was doing when it gave the Israeli-born film-video artist Irit Batsry the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. ''Irit Batsry: Set,'' a show that is the culmination of the award, introduces a deserving winner and a profoundly imposing if initially unprepossessing work of art.

"This wasn't entirely expected. The original announcement of Ms. Batsry as the winner was greeted with a collective ''Who?'' followed by a somewhat less collective ''Oh, no, not more film and video!''

"The joke was that the museum's survey would be renamed the Whitney Biennial Film Festival. The first Bucksbaum Award, handed out at the 2000 Biennial, went to Paul Pfeiffer, another video artist. But Mr. Pfeiffer's ''Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon)'' was among the 2000 Biennial's few real hits and truly original artworks. So Mr. Pfeiffer seemed an auspicious choice for the award, which harbors ambitions of becoming the American Turner Prize.

"When it came to buzz, the choice of Ms. Batsry more or less had none. Her videos and occasional installation pieces had almost never been shown in New York (although she has lived here since 1983), and her contribution to the 2002 Biennial had almost zero impact. ''These Are Not My Images (Neither There Nor Here),'' her beautiful but overly arty 80-minute feature in the show's film and video section, was shown only three times in the Biennial's 10-week run. (It will be screened a fourth time on Feb. 2 at 8:30 p.m. at MoMA Gramercy.)

"A nervier, sexier choice for the second Bucksbaum Award might have been the young two-man collective Forcefield, whose multimedia installation took up a lot of gallery space and polarized opinion. (I hated the noise and flashing lights but loved the knitted garments.)

"I doubt that I'm the only one who stands corrected. Ms. Batsry's current exhibition, which has been organized by Lawrence Rinder, curator of contemporary art at the Whitney, unveils ''Set,'' a seemingly modest but ultimately consuming video installation. Its superiority to ''These Are Not My Images'' suggests that it is some kind of breakthrough for the artist."

--Roberta Smith, The New York Times, January 9, 2004

 

The 2004 Biennial

"That the latest Whitney Biennial is easily the best in some time probably won't exempt it from the usual carping, the art world's blood sport, although the troika in charge clearly took pains to anticipate some of their critics. The team of curators that the former Whitney director, Maxwell L. Anderson, threw together — Chrissie Iles, Debra Singer and Shamim M. Momin — overcame the inevitable strains and nicely capitalized on their differences in taste, coming up with the most cogent and layered biennial in years."

--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, March 12, 2004

"Sometimes you feel the curators are just covering their bases, pulling cool artists from the right cliques. Politics are internal, not external. Still, at a time when biennials, triennials, and Documentas are as overblown, irritating, and automatic as Academy Award ceremonies, when it's not clear who or what these carnivalesque cattle calls are for, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer—the three Whitney curators appointed by former director Maxwell Anderson —should be cheered for giving us a biennial that has the virtue of being a fairly accurate, occasionally sparkling snapshot of what now looks like in American art.

"The art world is dying to like the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The opening was a lovefest. Previews in magazines and newspapers essentially implored, "Can't we all just get along and love the biennial?" Nearly all trotted out the cliché "the show everyone loves to hate." Disliking exhibitions is seen by some to be disloyal or obstructionist. This is traceable to the fact that in America today criticism and even civil disagreement are implicitly discouraged; people love to hate or even demonize those whose views differ from their own. But, criticizing flawed exhibitions isn't hating them. It's a way of treating them with respect. Mostly, the good wishes for this show stem from the fact that everyone wants the Whitney to be great again. This OK Biennial is an excellent step."

--Jerry Saltz, The Village Voice, March 15, 2004

"The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better—more serious, more pleasurable—than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essays in the show's catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals are in their brains. The operative word is 'plainly.'

"Though huge and dense, the show exhilarates. (Its superb arrangement, in smallish rooms that often juxtapose works by two or three artists with some particular affinity, helps avert viewer fatigue.) Festivalism—the mode of processional theatricality that has long marked institutional group shows of contemporary art—barely applies. You will want to revisit works in this Biennial. Here's my short list of highlights: paintings and drawings by David Hockney, Elizabeth Peyton, Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, Amy Sillman, James Siena, Lecia Dole-Recio, Raymond Pettibon, Robyn O'Neil, Robert Mangold, Chloe Piene, and Laylah Ali; video installations by Catherine Sullivan, Craigie Horsfield, Eve Sussman, and Slater Bradley; a photographic-conceptual work by Roni Horn; and exactly one mixed-media installation, by a group called assume vivid astro focus.
--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 15, 2004

"Taking on the critics, Maxwell Anderson, the Whitney's former director, calls the museum a 'feisty interlocutor' between artists and the public, in his foreword to the exhibition's catalog. Rather than trying to please people who don't like the biennial's experimental nature, or other critics upset because their favorite up-and-comers are omitted, the museum, he writes, follows a tradition of making room 'for lesser-known talents, even at the expense of artists in vogue.'
One such artist in the show for the first time is Cory Arcangel. He creates images by 'hacking' into classic video games, such as Super Mario Brothers from Nintendo - where he removed everything but the white clouds that float across a vibrant blue sky. Video-game musical compositions, another of his specialties, accompany his work.

' I finally figured out the formula for trying to make computer art that people might actually like,' he said at a recent preview, where he greeted press and patrons in a baseball cap and a white T-shirt with the word 'CodeWarrior' on it. He aimed for something his grandma might like, and discovered that simple is best. 'It's ... a lot of process, and it's really hard to do, but [the art] is simple.' 

"That kind of modern medium is what some patrons want more of, and they acknowledge that the biennial brings attention to such styles.  'How would most of this community ever learn of Cory Arcangel?' wonders Troy Tyler at the preview. "The purpose of the show is to introduce people to stuff they wouldn't normally see, and particularly people who don't get to go galleries and aren't steeped in this culture," he adds, echoing Mr. Anderson.

"War and peace, cultural and political influences of the 1960s and '70s, and even reality TV are among the issues the works explore. One memorable piece is Yayoi Kusama's 2002 'Fireflies on the Water.' It features a small room covered with mirrors, a floor covered with water, and tiny colored lights hanging from the ceiling. "Fireflies" was a favorite of museum member Sheila Klebanow. She usually attends the biennial - undeterred by the flurry of press criticism - but often likes only a few things. This year was different.  'I found more that I enjoyed in this biennial than in many of the others put together,' says the psychiatrist from Scarsdale, N.Y., who plans return with her granddaughter."

--Kim Campbell, The Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2004

 

"I like the Whitney Biennial. I like the Whitney Biennial. I like the Whitney Biennial.

"Those three lines were written before I even set out for New York, where the 2004 edition of the nation's most important roundup of contemporary art has just launched.

"My triple affirmation was partly meant to fight against a long tradition of panning the show. What could be duller than taking potshots at a famous exhibition that is already certain to take its share of hits?

But it also had deeper roots:  If art lovers are almost always disappointed by the Whitney's survey, maybe the problem lies in our expectations rather than in the show itself. Though it features more than 300 works chosen from across the nation in something like nine months, we still somehow imagine that the biennial should be a tight, coherent show of excellent art. In fact, it can never be more than a grab bag of whatever work happens to have been made since the previous edition of the show.

"Great exhibitions come about when curators identify important art that speaks to them, and then spend many years shaping it into a show that will speak to us. The Whitney Biennial comes about because another two years have gone by and someone's got to pull something together, fast.

"Whitney curators Chrissie Iles, Debra Singer and Shamim Momin did a fine, responsible job in pulling together this biennial. They crisscrossed the country, conducting hundreds of studio and gallery visits, then picked out 108 artists and collectives that seemed to represent the most notable new tendencies in art. Of their picks, 11 or so struck me at once as worth a longer look. Ten percent. Not a great ratio, maybe, but not too bad, all things considered. These curators can hardly be blamed if their show comes at a moment in the history of art that just about everyone concedes to be unusually sluggish."

--Blake Gopnik, The Washington Post, March 14, 2004

 

"Organized every other year by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the [Whitney Biennial] exhibition fills three of the museum's four floors, its lobby and below-ground restaurant and shop - as well as, this year, the museum's roof and a number of off-site spaces in Central Park - trying valiantly to fulfill a self-imposed mandate to reflect art activity in this country that occurred during the past two years.

"The impossibility of succeeding at such a Herculean task has prevented other museums from attempting similar surveys, investing the Biennial with an importance no mere exhibition should have to bear and guaranteeing that it receives a barrage of brickbats from dissatisfied members of the art world - critics, collectors, dealers, artists and other curators - who feel that they could have done better if given the opportunity.  Indeed, former Whitney director Maxwell L. Anderson forthrightly acknowledges in his catalog foreword that although the Biennial proves to be a popular event for visitors, it is also 'an infuriating one for art world insiders.'

"The Whitney has been organizing biennials (originally annuals) since 1932. This is the 72nd, making it the nation's most venerable contemporary visual art tradition. Current museum director Adam D. Weinberg - the Whitney tends to change directors as often as the styles represented in the Biennial do - writes that the Biennial is perhaps the museum's 'defining exhibition,' adding that it is 'a requisite, periodic report from the front.'  If the metaphor is militaristic, it is because the wars fought in the art world are vicious and can be professionally fatal."
--David Bonetti, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 2, 2004

 

Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985

"Ana Mendieta, the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, took up little physical space in the world.  But she has loomed large in contemporary art since her violent death at 36 in 1985... Mendieta...comes through as the alert, ambitious artist she was, one who absorbed and acted on a wide range of ideas: aesthetic, ethnic, sexual, religious, political.  Her best images, like one in which her nude body seems to be growing flowers, are of death and transfiguration, and they have the heartbreaking writ-on-water sting of fine poems."

--Holland Cotter, The New York Times, July 9, 2004

 

 

Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha

and

Ed Ruscha and Photography

"Ed Ruscha's reputation as a cool dude precedes him, as it always has. How could it not? He emerged as a prominent Los Angeles artist at a time when being one conjured up photogenic good looks, perpetual tans and impeccable cars. That would be the 1960's, of course, and while these attributes may have been more mythic than actual, Mr. Ruscha typified them to perfection...But looks and lifestyle aside, the real basis of Mr. Ruscha's low-centigrade-temperature reputation is his art. As two inevitably elegant shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art demonstrate, it has kept its cool for more than 40 years. It has become synonymous with immaculate surfaces, sardonic aloofness and verbal-visual subtleties for which the word ''pun'' is completely inadequate....

The great thing about the twin Whitney shows is the way they suggest that Mr. Ruscha may not be so cool at all. Together, they provide glimpses of vulnerability, tenderness and ambitious drive that add up to quite a bit of heat. They also detail the sources of his all-American style as never before and reveal the corrosive underside of Mr. Ruscha's seemingly neutral, uninflected images, which has been elaborated on by a host of younger artists, starting with Mike Kelly and Jack Pierson. These shows confirm Mr. Ruscha not only as a first generation Pop artist, but also as a post-Pop innovator on a par with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, nowhere more so than in his elaborate involvement with photography. The big show at the Whitney is the first full-scale retrospective of Mr. Ruscha's drawings, the medium and methods that are in many ways at the core of his achievement. A smaller, in some ways more revelatory show in the museum's tiny lobby gallery examines Mr. Ruscha's career-long involvement with photography and includes previously unexhibited and unpublished early work. The drawing show, which fills the fourth floor, has been organized by Margit Rowell, former head of the Museum of Modern Art's drawing department. Its lengthy title, ''Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha'' comes from the artist's interview in the catalog, in which, speaking with Ms. Rowell, he jokingly characterizes cause and effect: two of his favorite drawing tools and the magical effects they work.

"In the Whitney ground-floor gallery, 'Ed Ruscha and Photography,' organized by Sylvia Wolf, the museum's curator of photography, is equally effective whether viewed before or after the drawing show. (It also dovetails perfectly with Ms. Rowell's catalog essay, which carefully examines the way the look of photography and the experience of taking pictures affected Mr. Ruscha's spatial angles and illusions.) While Mr. Ruscha once said he didn't consider photography an art, this show introduces it as his first love. It includes several of his familiar books, whose images occasionally served as the basis for some of the drawings upstairs. But the revelation of the show is a series of beautifully structured little photographs that Mr. Ruscha took on a trip to Europe with his mother and his brother just after he graduated from Chouinard in April 1961. He went armed with a Yashica two-and-a-quarter-inch twin-lens reflex camera and his frequently professed admiration for Walker Evans, and he came back with hundreds of beautifully crystalline images of buildings, landscapes and, increasingly, billboards and signs.

"Ms. Wolf's lovely show, accompanied by a thorough, almost oppressively detailed catalog, presents a portrait of the artist as a young man who found his indelibly American style and subject matter during a prolonged trip to Europe. Mr. Ruscha visited 17 countries in seven months, which suggests that the epitome of L.A. cool may have been the last American to be radically changed by the traditional Grand Tour of the European continent."

--Roberta Smith, The New York Times, June 25, 2004

Home