Art
A Fine Modness
A stunning new museum makes the case that modern art—which was born in the nineteenth century—is alive and well and living in Fort Worth.
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Inside the galleries, Auping shows Ando's expansive, sometimes profligate spaces unusual respect, paring the inaugural presentation of the permanent collection to around a hundred pieces, leaving off the walls (and floors) dozens of major works any contemporary curator would kill for. Forgoing the recent curatorial vogue for grouping similar objects from dissimilar times, Auping preserves a chronological procession of post-war art—basically forties through sixties in the downstairs galleries, seventies to the present upstairs—while illustrating a marked continuity throughout the entire period. "As a curator, I don't really believe in Postmodernism," he says. "The history of art isn't like a Prada store, where you have to clear the old merchandise out to make room for the new. I don't think Modern art is over." What emerges instead of the conventional Modern-Postmodern cleavage is an uninterrupted, half-century-long dialectic of opposing forces: image and abstraction, nature and technology, earnestness and irony, high art and popular culture.
The struggles are often internal, evident in a figure as seminal as Jackson Pollock, whose painted-on-the floor, all-over abstractions of the late forties and early fifties cast a huge shadow over the rest of the century, influencing everything from color-field painting to Minimalism and performance and conceptual art. Yet in Number 5, 1952, Pollock's skeins of black industrial enamel have already coalesced back into roiling figurative forms. Philip Guston, who in the early fifties adopted the unusually pensive Abstract Expressionist style represented by the museum's lyrically brushed, lilac and gray The Light (1964), later looked like a far more ferocious prophet of Postmodernism, retaining his characteristic palette and brushwork while backpedaling toward representation. Painter's Forms II (1978) is an underground cartoonist's nightmare: an open mouth spewing a perverse cornucopia of cigarette butts, legs, nails, and trash can lids. Francis Bacon, one of the great perpetuators of the figurative tradition during the hegemony of abstract painting (he was arguably a Postmodernist before the term had been coined), nevertheless pares his eerie Self Portrait (1956) to a stunningly abstract essence, his charcoal suit, pasty face, and diabolical grin barely materializing from a black background as existentially freighted as any late Rothko.
While the Modern's collection teaches a lesson about the porous borders of styles and movements, the presentation is far from didactic. There are witty surprises, like Italian sculptor Michelangelo Pistoletto's The Etruscan (1976), a toga-clad bronze facsimile of a Roman Republican-era statue, encountered in one of the two-story apselike alcoves found at the east end of each gallery. The bronze figure reaches out to touch a mirror mounted on the wall, as though testing a portal to another world; approaching the statue, the museumgoer suddenly sees his or her own reflection conflated with the image of the lost-in-time ancient, a visual pun transformed into a meditation on mortality. An even more dramatic memento mori is Andy Warhol's nine-foot-tall, black-and-neon-green Self-Portrait (1986), a masklike disembodied head that glowers like a tribal shaman at the top of the grand staircase; the artist's familiar mop top, rendered in splashy brushwork, resembles both a primitive headdress and the explosive impact of a gunshot to the head (a year after painting Self-Portrait, Warhol, who years earlier survived the shooting he alludes to in the museum's 1982 painting Gun, died after routine gallbladder surgery).
Warhol's monstrous presence has a physicality that is really the leitmotiv of the Modern's collection, which, while representing the diversity of recent art—video, conceptual, photography, wall drawings, sound art— emphasizes big, painterly paintings, hefty metal and stone sculptures, and iconic rather than obscure themes. In this convocation of heavyweights, the champion turns out to be the acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer, whose lead-and-tin sculpture Book With Wings (1992-1994) spans 17 feet and commands the entire concrete-walled elliptical gallery. Both ironic and elegiacally somber, in equal parts mythic (one thinks of Icarus or Nike) and political (Nazi book burnings cum contemporary censorship), it looks like Postmodernism at its best: a new image invested with the weight of history. But even more portentous is Kiefer's Aschenblume (1983-1997), a 25-foot-wide canvas crusted with a muddy gray mixture of paint, clay, ash, and earth, seemingly as much an artifact of a real apocalypse as a work of art. The ghostly image underlying this tortured surface, its scratched and scrawled outline visible as a great V spread across the painting, is a perspective drawing of Nazi architect Albert Speer's grandiose Mosaic Room of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, a monumental symbol of Germany's tragic history and collective guilt; a large dried sunflower stuck on the canvas at the painting's perspectival vanishing point, its seeds pouring out, represents the post-war generation's hope of redemption (Kiefer was born the year the war ended). A Postmodern-era icon deeply indebted to Modernism (most obviously Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism), Kiefer's massive canvas demonstrates the folly of disregarding Modernism as an ongoing engine of contemporary culture.
The Fort Worth Modern's director, Marla Price, and her board and staff set out years ago to make the new Modern more than just the next new museum, and instead of simply turning up in the latest designer label (there's something akin to grade inflation these days in mid-American civic culture, where edgy architectural imports have become a dime a dozen), they've made a provocative cultural statement. Whether the Modern's modernity is a bellwether of changing attitudes or just a magnificent anachronism remains to be seen. But it comes at a moment when Postmodernism's promise to reengage the human spirit and imagination appears even more empty than Modernism's promise to make better people through better forms. (Modernism did change the way the world looks, just not the way people behave.) The Fort Worth Modern's installation and architecture suggest a third way, a new Modernism that avoids the utopian absolutism of the old. The new Modernism could aspire instead to a harmony of opposites: enriched by the past while envisioning the future, finding new forms for ancient myths, global in scope while respecting local character. The shape of the future may never have been less clear, but the signal success of Fort Worth's brilliant new museum is that we are once again invited to imagine it.
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