ART Beat Art

If you can find an extra minute during the rush of the holidays, plan to spend it visiting “The Poets of the Cities” exhibition on display through December 29th at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Pollock Gallery at SMU. The exhibition is easy enough to laud simply because it happened. It is the sort of thing that moves art-and the Arts-one giant step forward in Dallas.



Robert Murdock, curator of contemporary arts at DMFA; Lana Davis, the museum’s assistant curator of education; and spearheader Neil A. Chassman, chairman of SMU’s Department of Art History,deserve plaudits far beyond, I’m sure, what the Dallas community will give them. The amassing of so large and significant an exhibition by a couple of Dallas institutions shows the right kind of commitment to contemporary art, scholarship and education.



And undoubtedly, the show has PR value. The show will move on from Dallas to the San Francisco Museum of Art and then the Wadsworth Athe-neum in Hartford, Connecticut, both prestigious institutions. Texas is not generally regarded as a major source of creative museum programming, and Dallas can undoubtedly profit from the exposure the show’s travel will provide. The SFMA stop is particularly encouraging because the show evokes the old San Francisco scene and because the journey hints at a growing cooperation between Dallas and the SFMA’s director, Henry Hopkins, who left the directorship of the Fort Worth Art Museum last December.

But the exhibition is truly exciting because it captures and represents a fascinating artistic period. This is the art that grew out of the American Fifties, that socially tranquil, but artistically turbulent and inventive era. The late Forties brought the rise of American dominance in visual art. Prior to World War II, Paris had been the hotbed of artistic creativity: The Paris of Picasso and Brach, the Fitz-geralds, Hemingway, Stein and the surrealists. The ugliness and desolation of the war drove much of the emerging new talent out of the continent to New York. That, in turn, helped spark the artistic combustion of the Fifties, which led to Abstract Expressionism.

Ab-Ex was the realistic, gestural, gutsy style of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and about a dozen other first generation practitioners, who took the art world by storm during the era. Among the accomplishments of the movement: (1) Virtually alone, it transferred the capital of the world of art across the Atlantic to New York. (2) It made folk heroes and highly influential figures of its chief players, particularly the romantic, tragic persona of Pollock. (3) It set the stage for the bohemian-artist-as-caveman, a sister of the Beatnik phenomenon, a radical departure from the cerebral, cultured eccentricity associated with surrealism. (4) Most importantly, it furnished the next generation of artists with a powerful intellectual force, to which it would react with growing impetus and momentum.

The principal Abstract Impressionists are represented in the DMFA show. Pollock’s “Portrait in a Dream,” de Kooning’s “Saturday Night,” Kline’s “Slate Cross,” and Still’s “Un-titled 1948-49” are included. But the focus of the show is the work of artists who emerged in the wake of Ab-Ex: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, and others from the East Coast; and Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner from the Bay Area. These men provided the most prominent manifestation of a new, and extreme, order of viewing the world in the wake of Ab-Ex. Along with Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, George Brecht, Red Grooms and others included in the show, these artists combined objects with painted surfaces, printed words and other collage elements to expand the notion of visual perception by placing ordinary objects in out-of-the-ordinary situations. Suddenly automobile tires, discarded clothes, spare machine parts and such, were perceived as instruments of art. Indeed, this exhibition is entitled “Poets of the Cities” partly because these artists drew so heavily on the urban environment.

Out-of-context juxtaposition as a tool of artistic expression was used in other art forms during this period, and the organizers of the show were clever enough to incorporate some of them. Opening week featured the jazz of Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others, the music and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the films of Conner, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. All drew upon similar devices appropriate to the particular medium.

It’s altogether possible that the show helped place a definitive lid on this era, which I think has suffered from a lack of serious critical attention. Attempts at criticism have been disjointed, for the simple reasons that the centers of artistic activity were at opposite ends of the continent, and the works of the era were so tough to categorize: They lacked the clear, decisive, stylistic handles of Ab-Ex, which preceded them, or Pop Art, which followed.

Still, I have a few quarrels with the exhibition. For one thing, I wish the catalog could have been tighter. The Whitney Museum had an exhibit of Pop Art last spring; it brought in Lawrence Allaway, a really big name, to organize the show and author the catalog, which has since been hailed as a definitive text on the subject. Several of the essays in the “Poets of the Cities” catalog were good. However, the main contribution by Chass-man lacks the clarity of Allaway’s text, though theoretically it is a fine piece. I also regret that more attention was not given to the role of the West Coast artists in the Beat Movement. Berman Conner and most of the others have not received the credit due their contributions, and this exhibit was the time and place to do it.

I also have some trouble with the span of the show (1950-1965). If the show runs through 1965, where are the pop artists? Weren’t the pop artists, with their comic book/billboard/ mass production motif, as concerned with the urban environment as the artists included in the exhibit?

Moreover, I’m afraid that the pervasive Southern museum curitorial attitude of “it’s good enough for who it’s for” crept into the show’s organization. Some of the selections are, frankly, second rate. Where was a really first class early Rauschenberg combine? Why was there not more documentary material of Dine, Ka-prow, Grooms, Whitman and Old-enberg? If Ab-Ex examples were to be included, why were they not really prime examples; Chassman rightly discussed the importance of both Pollock’s overall drip paintings and de Kooning’s women series in his essay, and we should have been given a visual taste.

The Nevelson contribution was disappointingly small, belittling by its lack of size her achievements in light of her overall ouvre. The Larry Rivers painting, while beautiful, displayed none of his use of three dimensional objects, which would have been more appropriate in this context.

Nitpicks, to be sure, consideringthe importance of this exhibit happening in Dallas. All in all, the “Poetsof the Cities” exhibition was something of a milestone for contemporaryart scholarship and Texas curator-ship. People who care should be keeping their fingers crossed and theircheckbooks open in anticipation ofother such efforts. The DMFA isclearly aspiring to the achievement ofgreat goals.