Review: The Met Museum Gives Acres of New Space to Abstract Art

Many art museums are now in the process of re-installing their permanent collections, trying to make the story of art more inclusive. It’s a noble goal. “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera,” which opens Monday at the Metropolitan Museum, is an effort in this direction. Mingling works from the permanent collection with choice loans from foundations and other sources, the show sets out to prove that post-World War II abstraction – from the gestural, emotive canvases of Abstract Expressionism to the stripped-down geometries of Minimalism – is not strictly a male creation. Of the 40 artists in the show, 16 are women. Consider this social progress.

The show opens on a magisterial note. The first gallery is devoted mostly to Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings look more classical as the years pass. In the second gallery, the lights dim, and a group of Rothko paintings glimmer like headlights through shadow. But once you’re in the third gallery, the chronology breaks down, as does the narrative, and the show becomes a mixed bag with an inexplicable number of mediocre works by artists who deserve better. A particularly dull stretch of wall pairs three Bridget Rileys with a late, predominantly white Barnett Newman, simply because they have stripes.

On the plus side, curator Randall Griffey has pulled some wonderful finds from the Met’s storage racks. I loved seeing Louise Nevelson’s room-size assemblage, “Mrs. N’s Place,” Joan Mitchell’s “La Vie en Rose,” and Anne Truitt’s “Goldsborough,” a slender wooden column of dusky-pink that, as it turns out, was donated to the museum by her friend Helen Frankenthaler, who also makes a strong appearance in the show.

But none of the above-mentioned artists are still living, and you would not know from this exhibition that abstract painting is currently enjoying a resurgence. Although the show is billed as a survey that extends from the post-war years through the present, it skimps on recent work.

Where are the artists who are rehabilitating abstract art today – namely, Cecily Brown, Amy Sillman, Julie Mehretu, Charline von Heyl, and the sculptor Arlene Shechet? The Met’s new show, astoundingly, omits all of them. That could change within the next year or so, since the exhibition, I hear, is a quasi-permanent installation that will be modified occasionally. One hopes that the curators will think about rotating in younger artists. The Met needs to establish that abstract art is not a historical style that peaked a half-century ago, but a force that still speaks to us today.