Abstract Expressionism
Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020-7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk). Until 2 January
Abstract expressionism is rather unfashionable these days, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Among curators, there is a sense that the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko represent “a dinosaur among artistic tendencies – lumbering and unsophisticated, macho and American”. All it takes to disprove this view is a visit to the Royal Academy’s “stirring” new exhibition, the first major survey of abstract expressionism in this country since 1959. The show features more than 160 works, and combines themed stretches of paintings with single galleries devoted to the movement’s “stars”. It is a “big, grand, no-nonsense art show that lifts the spirits and pounds them”. On and on it goes, “superb stretch after superb stretch”. There is no curatorial faffing around, just dozens of works hung in circumstances that feel “close to perfect”. “I’m not sure I have ever seen these galleries look better.”
The show is full of “beautiful, marvellous and terrifying things”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian: Pollock’s “explosive and tender” action paintings; Rothko’s “tangy brightness and trembling, tremulous darkness”; along with a host of other highlights, from David Smith’s sculptures, to Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings, to 12 rarely seen works by Clyfford Still. Yet the exhibition has clear failings. The work of female abstract expressionists is under-represented, and most of the paintings here have to “fight it out” in crowded displays that “deaden individual works and achievements”. This is indeed a “ropey” show, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard. It fails to answer even the most basic questions about the movement. Pollock’s drips, Newman’s straight lines, Rothko’s rectangles: why did each artist choose a “logo-like abstract style”? And why are their paintings so big?
This is a “colossal” exhibition, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. It is “thrilling” to see so many masterpieces in one place, from De Kooning’s Dark Pond, to Franz Kline’s “fierce black brushmarks”, to an early self-portrait by Rothko – depicting him as “a big lug in a brown jacket”. But with so many packed together, these works lose their “awesome power”. Even some of Pollock’s canvases seem like “turgid repetitions”, and Newman’s works, such as the “soaring” Ulysses, are “consistently hampered” by a lack of space. The show casts its net far too wide, and dilutes the “pure rush of exhilaration” that comes with the best abstract expressionist painting.