Word: connoisseurship
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Despite the cuts forced by the Met's director, Thomas Hoving, the show remains a triumph of connoisseurship -one of the great museum events of the past 20 years. This is due in no small part to the detail. Rather than being a portmanteau of highlights, the exhibition includes an immense range of underrated "minor" figures like the neoclassicists Jean-François-Pierre Peyron and Jean Germain Drouais. The subject matter runs from the grandest of historical paintings to an eccentric still life with stuffed birds; the figures, from a swooning and epicene Death of Hyacinth by Jean...
...partly because nobody except Abram Lerner, its director, and Hirshhorn has seen everything in it. Hirshhorn has been collecting longer than the Museum of Modem Art, and with hardly less money at his disposal. The tone has been one of impetuous enthusiasms and voracity, rather than the historically balanced connoisseurship a great museum needs. Thus Hirshhorn's enthusiasm for De Kooning has resulted in a superb group of early De Koonings, whereas some other key abstract expressionists, notably Pollock, are represented by weak or indifferent works. So although the works on view are obviously picked with care, they contain...
...emetically extravagant volume by a writer named John Rublowsky. Yet who today shall say he was not right? By 1965 pop had become the most popular movement in American art history, drenched in ballyhoo, gratefully supported by legions of collectors whose appetites bore the same relation to connoisseurship that TV dinners do to poulet en demi-deuil. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Rosenquist, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschenberg became instant household names, not counting their swarm of epigones. "What we have with the pop artists," wrote the English critic Lawrence Alloway, "is a situation in which success has been combined with misunderstanding...
What tombaroli disperse and often destroy is precisely that kind of vital information. In this way the unfettered acquisitiveness of museums in America and elsewhere, with their concentration on "masterpieces," results in a form of destruction of the past. Connoisseurship and history have become enemies...
...Ernst will be 82 this year. He is rightly held to be one of the fathers of modern art, having outlasted most of his progeny. Dada and Surrealism, the movements that he helped fertilize, are now ticketed and labeled. Their revolutionary ambitions have been reduced to connoisseurship and slipped into the museum. Most of Ernst's allies in the Surrealist adventure are dead...