"The Sweeney Decade: Acquisitions at the 1959 Inaugural"

Jackson Pollock, Ocean Greyness

Photograph: Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Money, the old Cyndi Lauper tune goes, changes everything, and the same goes for the lack of it. Take, for example, this quote from a recent New York Times article about the just-opened Venice Biennale and its greatly diminished wow factor, thanks to organizers having $1.4 million less to play with than they did two years ago. Bemoaning the lack of the financial support participants typically receive to realize their projects, one unidentified artist told the Times, “It’s like being invited to a party and then asked to bring your own food and drink.”

The sense of entitlement in that statement is pretty amazing. But then, the operating assumption in the aughts seems to have been that every artist is somehow a Michelangelo deserving of a Medici pope and a shot at the Sistine Chapel (though I can’t think of too many Last Judgments resulting from all the money that was sloshing around). It’s hard to imagine someone like Willem de Kooning feeling that way 50 years ago—and he possessed a pretty sizable ego. That, at least, was one impression I took from the Guggenheim’s latest show, which features the paintings and sculptures purchased by the museum the year that Frank Lloyd Wright’s building opened. Another is that old-school abstraction still has a lot of kick to it.

Part of the golden-anniversary celebration of Wright’s Fifth Avenue nautilus, “The Sweeney Decade: Acquisitions at the 1959 Inaugural,” throws a spotlight on the Guggenheim’s fabled second director, James Johnson Sweeney, who helmed the Gugg during the critical years between 1952 and 1960, when Wright’s edifice was being completed. De Kooning is on tap, as is Jackson Pollock, but the exhibition also includes less familiar names, among them Alberto Burri, Eduardo Chillida and Takeo Yamaguchi. A fascinating peek into the midcentury curatorial mind-set, “The Sweeney Decade” features only one woman artist, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched Mad Men. But given the cultural dominance of the United States at the time, the net that Sweeney cast for artists from Europe and Japan seems a bit unorthodox, despite the institution’s traditionally international outlook. And regardless, the work of the foreign artists here clearly reflected the prevailing trope of the time: American Abstract Expression. Nonetheless, Sweeney’s choices foreshadowed the worldwide scope of the current art scene, impoverished though it may be compared with the very recent past.

One big difference, however, was that today’s unholy alliance of global capital and poststudio practice simply didn’t exist back in 1959. Duchamp had yet to achieve the influence he would subsequently enjoy, and his readymade strategy was still considered a Dadaist joke—not the formula for big money to create big installations for big, heavily attended exhibitions and fairs. In contrast, the works in this show were made without the expectation of a huge audience. Quite the contrary, in fact, as the idea of the avant-garde was still very much in vogue. Art was a priestly calling, though in retrospect, the heated arguments that once surrounded the various orders represented in “The Sweeney Decade”—in addition to AbEx, the lesser-known Tachism, Art Informel and CoBrA movements from Europe—don’t matter much anymore. Indeed, for all the ferocity of intent that presumably went into fashioning these objects individually, their effect when taken together is rather quite soothing.

William Baziotes’s Dusk (1958), for instance, renders its crepuscular theme as ectoplasmic shapes trapped in the amber of a smooth, tightly modulated surface, the sort of treatment you might associate with realism. Jean-Paul Riopelle’s Blue Night (1953) features a patterned mosaic of short, choppy strokes in primary and secondary colors, a kind of stained-glass window for the church of painting. The attenuated marks in Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva’s Aix-En-Provence (1958) suggest a Cézanne caught in a transporter beam. Pollock is represented not by one of his drip paintings, but by Ocean Grayness (1953), a relatively late canvas in which seemingly representational elements—eyes in this case—play peekaboo with the viewer from within a deep painterly murk.

Ironically, Sweeney never cared much for Wright’s creation; he felt that the design upstaged the art, and he was absolutely correct about that. But judging from this show, he knew what looked good in the place—something that hasn’t always been true of his successors.

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