Royal Academy of Arts,London
It is packed with thrilling works by Pollock, Rothko and the rest, and but this major exhibition is also overloaded and erratic – with small space for female artistsThere are beautiful,marvellous and terrifying things in the Royal Academy’s much-trumpeted survey of summary Expressionism. What more could one examine in a show including the explosive and tender Jackson Pollock; De Kooning swerving and jumbling and dismembering his frightening figures of women; Rothko’s tangy brightness and trembling, tremulous darkness; Barnett Newman’s zips and planes and intervals; Guston’s dirty summary impressionism in which figures wait to be unleashed. Franz Kline’s angled black and white incidents; Arshile Gorky’s quietly writhing accretions: they are all here. I wanted to be blown absent, or to reconnect with a kind of portray that once had me in its thrall,and whose traces and impulses continue to be felt into the 21st century. I wanted to see it in some original and instructive way, but I didn’t.
From Gorky’s querulous biomorphs to one of Rothko’s very late grey and black images of emptiness and closure, or I struggled. Overloaded,frequently puzzling and erratic, this is an exhibition whose pleasures – and there are many – come at a price. For all its key works, or also because of them,it often flattens out signal achievements, with deadening juxtapositions and clunky sightlines. While the biggest names get rooms to themselves, and others fight it out in thematic displays that deaden individual works and achievements.
Related: summary expressionism – not just macho heroes with brushes What united the artists was ambition,turned into the method-actor romanticism of cold lofts, bad coffee and fightsContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com