The museum of the present

THE NEW CRITERION

December 2016

The Museum of the Present

What’s a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in The New Criterion. It’s one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it’s one that I wish museums would ask more frequently of themselves. Because the answers are changing—through assumptions that are often unannounced, unacknowledged, and unexplored.

Writing nearly twenty years ago on “the ongoing transformation of the American museum,” the late theorist Stephen E. Weil identified how museums were moving from “being about something to being for somebody.” This is a phrase that has been taken up by critics of contemporary museum culture, but for Weil it signaled a positive change, a momentous redirection he traced back to the cultural revolts of the 1960s. The museum of the past, he said, was content to care for the “oldfashioned satisfaction,” “aesthetic refreshment,” and “pleasure and delight” of its permanent collection—or what the museum director Barbara Franco derided as the “salvage and warehouse business.” Through new evaluation standards tied to continued tax-exempt status, Weil argued, the museum of today “is being told that to earn its keep requires that it be something more important than just an orderly warehouse.” In other words, through historical inevitability and government coercion, Weil concluded, the museum of tomorrow must come to see itself not as the steward of a collection of objects but as “an instrument for social change.”

Twenty years on, the prophecy is coming true—but with increasingly ominous and destructive results, especially for collecting museums. In 1997 the Brazilian museum director Maria de Lourdes Horta envisioned how “a museum without walls and without objects, a true virtual museum, is being born” to be “used in a new way, as tools for self-expression, self-recognition, and representation.” Or as Neal Benezra, the director of sfmoma, more recently observed, “times have changed. Back then, a museum’s fundamental role was about taking care of and protecting the art, but this century it’s much more about the visitor experience.”

Over the last few decades the American museum has only been too successful at turning this vision into reality. By the numbers, museums have become thriving enterprises, competing and ballooning into what we might call a museum industrial complex. Today there are 3,500 art museums in the United States, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000. At the same time, and hand in hand with these numbers, billions of dollars have been spent on projects that have largely focused on expanding the social-service offerings at these institutions—restaurants, auditoriums, educational divisions, event spaces—rather than additional rooms for collections. At the present rate, the museum of the future will virtually be a museum without objects, as new non-collection spaces dwarf exhibition halls with the promise that no direct contact with the past will disturb your meal. As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum once advertised, the museum of the future will finally be a café with “art on the side.”

The museum of the past focused on its permanent collection. The museum of the present forsakes the visited, and its own cultural importance, to focus on the visitor. From offering an unmediated window onto the real and astonishing objects of history, the contemporary museum increasingly looks to reify our own socially mediated self-reflections. This it does not learn from history but to show the superiority of our present time over past relics. The result is a museum that succeeds, by every popular measure, in its own destruction—a museum that is no longer an ark of culture, but one where the artifact at greatest risk is the museum itself.

Executive Editor James Panero discusses the character and trends of contemporary art museums.

The American art museum was born in the nineteenth century, a century later than its European counterparts and largely as an answer to those institutions, but with a unique American quality tied to its permanent collection. Unlike in Europe, where museums were either created out of revolutionary turmoil or acts of government, almost all American institutions were founded and supported by the free will of private individuals. The treasures these benefactors bequeathed became not only public objects of secular devotion but also tokens of the idealism behind the institutions that maintained them. As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent our civic virtues. The aesthetic education offered through their permanent collections was not just about history and connoisseurship. It was also about how hard work can become an expression of virtue by gifting objects to the public trust. It’s truly an astonishing American story: no other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good.

But it wasn’t long into the twentieth century before some American museums began to attack their own cellular structure, usually in the pursuit of progressive social change. These assaults were most manifest in the physical transformations and deformations of institutional buildings. Now, in many cases it should be said that the changing appearance of our museums was benign. Rather than malignant tumors, they signaled healthy growth through evolving architectural styles. The dozen or so buildings that make up the Metropolitan Museum of Art have created a unified whole out of an assembly that range from Gothic Revival to Beaux-Arts to modern. These diverse structures complement one another and work to complete the museum’s founding vision.

In contrast, consider the history of the Brooklyn Museum—born in 1823 nearly a half century before the Met and a manifestation of rising civic confidence in a borough that was once America’s third-largest independent city. In the 1930s, a progressive director by the name of Philip Newell Youtz launched an assault on his nineteenth-century museum from which this great unfinished institution has never recovered. Believing that the “museum of today must meet contemporary needs,” Youtz attacked the museum’s 1897 home designed by McKim, Mead & White on Eastern Parkway and vowed to “turn a useless Renaissance palace into a serviceable modern museum.” Praising the educational practices of the new Soviet museums, he undertook the transformation of the Brooklyn Museum from a temple of contemplation into a school of instruction, where the arts were put in the service of progressive ends and funding would derive from the state rather than private philanthropy. Youtz sought to transform his institution into a “socially oriented museum” with, as he stated, “a collection of people surrounded by objects, not a collection of objects surrounded by people.” He even hired department store window-dressers to arrange exhibitions and transform his collection into a parade of teachable moments.

Beyoncé Knowles with Apollo killing the Python snake at the Louvre.

Youtz then turned his programmatic assault into a physical one. Historians may question the ultimate motivation behind his demolition of the Brooklyn Museum’s exterior Grand Staircase, which once resembled the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was meant to elevate the museum-goer from Eastern Parkway into the refined precincts of the museum. What is not in doubt is Youtz’s belief that his iconoclasm, pushing the museum lobby down to street level, “improved” upon the McKim, Mead & White design. Continuing in this way, Youtz went about mutilating much of the museum’s ornamental interior.

In this example, we can see that a progressive strain agitating for a more “socially orientated museum” long predates the 1960s. But since the 1960s, such progressive ideology, combined with what I would call a non-profit profit motive that seeks ever larger crowds, greater publicity, expanding spaces, ballooning budgets, and bloated bureaucracy—a circular system that feeds on itself—has turned the American museum into a neoliberal juggernaut.

The expansion plans that museums now seem to announce by the day may appear to be the evidence of healthy organic growth. But their motivations are just as often closer in ideology to the removal of the Brooklyn Museum’s Grand Staircase—efforts at distancing the present from the past.

There are many examples. The 70,000-square-foot $114 million new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened in 2012, is but one. Designed by Renzo Piano, the building, which required the demolition of Gardner’s historic carriage house, now serves as the only entrance to the institution and connects with the original museum through a glass-enclosed airlock. The addition offers a Kunsthalle for new art, eateries, shops, a greenhouse, a visitor “living room,” and apartments. All are attractive, but for what end? A greenhouse to cultivate new interest? A hundred-million-dollar engine to generate new donors—even as streaks of rust still stain the museum courtyard? I would argue that the expansion primarily serves to quarantine the original museum’s antiquity behind an architectural filtration system. With the anointment of “Renzo’s oil,” the museum shifts its focus from what is left of its collection onto the visitor experience. As the Gardner’s director explained to me at the time of the opening, finally those people in their cars on Fenway Park Drive will recognize the Gardner as a museum, because here is Renzo Piano. Nevermind that the Gardner’s fanciful palazzo has been a signature of the Boston streetscape since 1903.

Back in New York, the Whitney, a museum with a vastly different history, relocated in 2015 from the Upper East Side to a flood zone along the Hudson River with results that are surprisingly similar to the Gardner’s. We have heard the modern museum referred to as a “white box.” Designed, again, by Renzo Piano, here is the museum as sky-box, an institution built as much to be looked out of as looked into, a place where see-and-be-seen has moved from the periphery to the main event. As opposed to the Whitney’s former fortress of solitude on Madison Avenue, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, the new museum metaphorically explodes, reprocesses, and repackages its own history through a giddy, irrational space for spectacle and an incinerator for its dusty, unwanted past.

This may be one reason why the institution has been rechristened as, simply, whitney, dropping the words “museum,” “American,” and “art” from its branding. Yet while Piano increased the Whitney’s floorplan from 85,000 to 220,000 square feet, just 50,000 of that is going to indoor galleries, up from 33,000 on Madison Avenue. The rest goes to multi-million-dollar views and a circulation system that forces the museumgoer outside onto a fire escape turned against the skyline, which like Piano’s Pompidou treats the museum as an institutional theater.

Do all of these initiatives really turn museums into instruments of “social change”? Do they merely justify bigger budgets and higher ticket prices? I would argue that by mediating our experience through ever more gauzy filters they in fact blunt the true radicalism of our direct encounter with the objects of history. Rather than “decentering us at a radical moment of unselfing,” as the director James Cuno once observed, today’s institutions promote “museum selfie day” and roll out every trick at recentering the experience of the museum around you. What better way, after all, to reap the benefits of hashtag advertising while entertaining the egocentrism of your turnstile clientele.

But why not? What is so wrong about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent promotion of “nail art sessions by Lady Fancy Nails” as it did around the show “Manus x Machina”?

Or what about a promotion by the Art Institute of Chicago that offered a “full-size replica of Van Gogh’s painting The Bedroom” available for nightly rental on AirBnB.

Or how about this season’s “Met Workout,” a museum-sponsored event that advertises: “Goodbye SoulCycle, hello Vermeer and Picasso. You thought just trying to stroll through The Met collection was a workout? Try doing stretches in the shadow of Diana or squats while pondering the shapely poise of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X.”

Maurizio Cattelan with his sculpture America t the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

This fall the Guggenheim museum installed a working gold toilet designed by the neo-Dadaist Maurizio Cattelan in one of its bathrooms. The facility, which requires a special guard and janitor, attracts hour-long lines that snake up the rotunda. This interactive Duchampian sculpture, the most shared golden toilet on the internet, is called America (how original), but it might just as well be titled “the museum.” The provocation is presented as an inside joke, but it ultimately degrades the institution itself for one more social-media share. A golden toilet is an appropriate symbol for the museum fully dedicated to the visitor experience.

The problem is that such promotions, by converting the museum from a temple of culture into a cathedral of the self, spend down its reserves of virtue. The Instagram age has little need for more venues for “self-expression, self-recognition, and representation.” Our times yearn for a real, unmediated engagement with the objects of the past that only a traditional collection-based museum can offer. This may be one reason why we saw a widespread uproar over the recent rebranding of the Metropolitan Museum. It wasn’t so much over its lackluster typography and a spendthrift rollout at a time of operational shortfalls. It was that so many people deeply admired what the museum’s traditional brand had come to represent.

There are many counterexamples to this story—museums that resist progressive currents and reaffirm their original collection mandates. Increasingly I draw encouragement not from too-big-to-fail institutions but from those tributaries and backwaters of our museum mainstream—from New York’s Hispanic Society, for example, preserved in amber on 155th Street and Broadway, to house museums like the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights, where Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote parts of Hamilton while sitting in Aaron Burr’s bedroom. Museum trustees still have the power to redirect their resources away from artless atriums and administrative bloat to true collection access through initiatives such as the visible storage centers sponsored by Henry R. Luce.

But I suspect we have only seen the proverbial tip of the iceberg now in the path of the museum at full speed. Museums may assume that new buildings and hashtag diplomacy will insulate them from the most destructive progressivist mandates, but these are just openings for a new generation of cultural leaders, contemptuous of the permanent collections of robber barons, to undermine their stewardship. Already, ill-adventuring museum directors such as Thomas Hoving have shown us what could be done through deaccessioning when, in the early 1970s, he began liquidating bequests over the objections of his curators to enhance his own discretionary spending. Now look for a further loosening of deacession standards.

For a generation, museums have chased after the numbers, with blockbuster exhibitions and amenities that have indirectly ceded curatorial control to the turnstile. The government now looks to accelerate this abdication of leadership through “reenvisioning our grant programs,” as the National Endowment for the Humanities announced this year.

If the museum visitor now expects to receive the keys to the collection, backed by government mandates, there may be little hope to save the museum from populist whim. In October an activist group called “Decolonize This Place” continued its targeting of museums by storming the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History. Chanting “Respect! Remove! Rename,” they then covered the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt and demanded “that City Council members vote to remove this monument to racial conquest.” At one time this might have seemed like an extreme suggestion, but given the current iconoclasm on university campuses, the protesters know they are part of a populist insurgency. This is the end result of the “museum for somebody”: a museum without objects that is ultimately objectless—a museum for nobody.

Detroit Chronicle

THE NEW CRITERION

October 2016

On the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit & the role of art in the history of the city.

Detroit is a city of art. Strange to say, but it’s true. While much has left this impoverished, often heartbreaking metropolis, what remains, surprisingly, is a rich art history, which is today right on the surface. With origins that run deep and predate the automobile, Detroit’s artistic roots flower over the city streets left empty by the cars that have, by and large, driven away. And they deserve attention, which is why I visited with the family on a late-summer road-trip, ten hours from New York, twelve by way of Niagara Falls—a rewarding and remarkable artistic pilgrimage.

It was a close call for Detroit to reach its current and still parlous state of the arts. Most of us had little idea of the Motor City’s artistic legacy until it was almost too late. After decades of decline, the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 hastened Detroit’s own insolvency, which in 2013 led to the largest municipal collapse in American history. Detroit was $18–20 billion in debt. As an emergency manager looked to liquidate assets, creditors made headlines as they closed in on the city’s remaining jewel: the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the country’s great encyclopedic museums.

The faith that those museum administrators once placed in the future of their city says much about the wild extremes Detroit has experienced over the last century. From a population of nearly 2 million in 1950, when it was arguably the richest city per capita in the country and the Silicon Valley of the Machine Age, today Detroit retains under 700,000 residents, experiencing a 25 percent decline in just the last decade as entire neighborhoods have been abandoned as ghost towns. A history of violence, Jim Crow, corruption, race riots, white flight, failed redevelopment, and monorails-to-nowhere has long accompanied these seismic shifts. Today much of the city seems more passively desolate than actively menacing, with weedy, empty streets and an abundance of graffiti-scarred architecture, some remaining from its Gilded Age. But such images of what have become known as Detroit’s “ruin porn” only tell one side of the story. The arts give a broader picture of the full, continuing life of the city, and they may play an increasing role in its future.

This is not to say that the arts will “save Detroit,” as some have suggested. The sociologist Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class in 2001, has staked much on this messianic and largely unproven claim for rustbelt renewal. Instead, cities work best when the planners get out of the way of artists rather than attempting to use them as tools of gentrification. Basing your urban future on jet-setting bohemians coming to town for a Matthew Barney film shoot is no way to keep the lights on and the water running, or, more to the point, strengthen the local cultural fabric. In his scabrous 2012 book, Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Mark Binelli was onto something when he wrote that “any potential Detroit arts renaissance remains in its earliest phase of development, more about insane real estate opportunities and the romantic vision of a crumbling heartland Berlin—basically, vicarious wish fulfillment by coastal arts types living in long-gentrified cities—than an overarching homegrown aesthetic.” Various reports of the founders of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn arts space Galapagos relocating to Detroit to develop (or flip) unused factory space have only fueled such creative-class speculation.

But Detroit did end up saving the art, starting with grassroots initiatives like the Heidelberg Project, founded in 1986 by the artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather as a surreal outdoor installation over reclaimed buildings in the city’s McDougall-Hunt neighborhood. The rescuing of DIA was a similar story of renewal that starts with the art itself. In 2014 Detroit’s latter-day Monuments Men won a decisive battle for cultural reconstruction by fighting to reach what was called a “grand bargain” to save the museum. With a collection valued at $8.4 billion, and 2,800 objects worth between $454 and $867 million claimed by the city—including a self-portrait by Van Gogh estimated at $150 million—DIA successfully scrambled to raise hundred of millions of dollars from a combination of private, state, and corporate donors to pay off the creditors. In return, the art stayed on the walls, the museum returned to its pre-1919 status as a private, non-profit institution, and the people of the state demonstrated the value they place in Detroit’s art history.

The Great Hall of the Detroit Institute of Arts

DIA is today in better shape than its Detroit surroundings, which isn’t saying much, but those expecting to find a museum that is partially finished (like the Brooklyn Museum) or partially closed (like today’s Met) will be surprised at its institutional polish. DIA’s rise out of Detroit’s ashes has stoked its institutional enthusiasm as one of the best half-dozen museums in the country. A visit here alone is worth the trip.

Starting in the 1920s, DIA’s museum director Wilhelm Valentiner, following the German model, was the first to arrange his collection by nation and chronology, rather than type. He also greatly increaseddia’s collection of modern art and was responsible for its single most well-known, and controversial, installation: Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry.

Personally, politically, dietetically, Rivera was a repellent individual, but you can see why capitalists from Rockefeller to Ford became enamored of the unrepentant Marxist. Painted over twenty-seven panels, floor to ceiling, from 1932 to 1933 in the museum’s light-filled central court, Detroit Industry captures the one-time dynamism of the city in a swirling, hallucinatory tableau. This “iconized Marxist fantasia of working-class solidarity and collective toil,” as Binelli describes it, unites the workers of the north, the farmers of the south, and the raw materials of the Americas in one interconnected utopian vision. The didacticism of the spectacle is saved by its strangeness, as Rivera worked in imagery of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, Frida Kahlo’s miscarriage, and the kidnapped Lindbergh baby—pagan currents flowing in the chthonic depths beneath Detroit’s River Rouge. (The dense iconography is today supplemented by an excellent multimedia guide on DIA’s website, which is also available on touch screens in the gallery.)

A sense for the subterranean runs throughout the artists of Detroit, especially those responding to its decades of decline. The late artist Mike Kelley, who was born in 1954 in a working-class suburb of Detroit, was a patron saint of the post-apocalyptic city even after he relocated west, exhuming the afterbirth of its marriage of man and machine. Much of this was on display in Kelley’s arresting PS1 retrospective in 2014. A member of the alt-rock band Destroy All Monsters, Kelley connected Detroit art and music, a scene which gave rise not only to Motown Records but also to the punk aesthetic ofMC5 and The Stooges, and later techno—music, in various ways, all connected with the internal combustion engine and the sounds of the assembly line. In 2014, an exhibition called “Another Look at Detroit (Parts 1 and 2)” at New York’s Marianne Boesky and Marlborough Chelsea, arguably the best gallery shows of the year, made explicit these cultural connections by gathering some hundred objects by seventy artists from over two centuries of Detroit cultural history. This magisterial “tone poem” was the work of the art consultant and Detroit native Todd Levin—whom I must also thank for suggesting I try the world’s best pancakes at a Detroit motel diner called Clique.

Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, 2012, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Just down Woodward Avenue from DIA is the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Mainly a Kunsthalle for contemporary shows, the museum’s big surprise can be found behind the parking lot. What looks like a modest prefab ranch house oddly positioned on an urban block is Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead. An uncanny reconstruction of his childhood home, the building now hosts rotating installations and a street-legal, detachable entryway that has already gone cross country. According to Kelley’s posthumous wishes (he committed suicide in 2012), the house is built with two private subterranean levels: a windowless duplicate floorplan beneath the ground level and, below that, a series of tunnels and ladders to connect the doorless rooms. A post-war dream atop a post-apocalyptic nightmare, the building serves as a chilling artist memorial.

A Detroit-area cultural institution very much in contrast with all this is Cranbrook, a school and cultural complex nestled in the sylvan and still- wealthy suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Founded in the 1920s, this institution may be best known today as the prep school where Mitt Romney bullied his classmates. But the Cranbrook Academy of Art also represents the prewar ideals of Detroit design given fascinating form in a pristine Arts and Crafts and Art Deco campus created by Eliel Saarinen. The Eameses both came from here, and Eliel’s son Eero went on to adapt the styles of Cranbrook for the jet age.

My trip to the Cranbrook Art Museum largely left me wanting more, as the campus’s extensive permanent collection is now sequestered in a new “Collections Wing” that is only open for one hour a week while the museum is given over to special and not-so-special exhibitions. Through October 9, the museum’s new director has imported his exhibition from the Walker Art Museum on “Hippie Modernism,” which makes a few interesting connections between Sixties utopianism and the dawn of the Information Age but mostly smells of patchouli and BO. It also has nothing to do with the school. Fortunately my visit was redeemed by a smaller, more technical exhibition downstairs on Pewabic Pottery, the ceramics studio and school founded in Detroit in 1903. I also took a detailed tour of the impeccable Saarinen House and Garden. As a total work of art, Cranbrook serves to remind us that Detroit, at its height, was a city of design that made flying sculptures and not just modes of auto-mobility.

Wasserman Projects

Back in Detroit, the contemporary gallery scene is small but sophisticated and growing, with several venues that have recently moved to the city. Wasserman Projects is a Chelsea-style space a block from the city’s extensive Eastern Market that over the summer was showing a group exhibition, including a whimsically enlarged notepad doodle by Michael Scoggins and a delicate collage of “oil, latex, gold leaf, string, soap, pencil” by Ed Fraga. Downtown, David Klein Gallery casts a wide and intelligent eye over the alternative scene by bringing together painters such as Brooke Moyse, Gary Peterson, and Mark Sengbusch. Over the summer, Galerie Camille, another smart venue just north in Midtown, brought together the artists Jeff Bourgeau and Matt Eaton in an elegant exhibition of Colorfield painting with a twist. As much an exhibition of process as of product, Eaton’s layered compositions of acrylic and spray paint contrasted with Bourgeau’s pixelated computer printouts of painterly forms.

Baby Grand gallery

My last stop proved to be a highlight: the opening of “It Runs Deep” at a gallery called Baby Grand in a burned-over corner of the city’s Southwest. This group show of Detroit-area artists, including Amber Locke, Alivia Zivich, Audra Wolowiec, Daniel Sperry, Kylie Lockewood, Margo Wolowiec, Nikolas Pence, Romain Blanquart, and Scott Reeder, was perfectly installed in the front rooms of an Arts and Crafts home that the owner of the gallery has named for its piano and illuminated only with naturallight. The sensitivity of the works, from Wolowiec’s sound installation to Reeder’s abstraction, speaks to the personal, the underground, and the hidden spirit of the arts in Detroit—which now, after a thaw, is beginning to grow into the light of day.

Gallery Chronicle (September 2016)

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2016

On “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of the many revelations to come out of “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913,” the excellent exhibition organized three years ago by Gail Stavitsky at the Montclair Art Museum, was a small watercolor of a rowboat on a lake. A blond woman leans over the stern, nearly submerging it in water as she seemingly smiles back at us. Behind her, standing on the upturned bow, a man twists on one leg as he attempts to remove his trousers—startled, it would appear, at our arrival.

Immediate, part quick illustration, part louche intrusion, the work may have been as shocking for its content in 1912 as it would be to us, today, for its attribution. Titled Romance or The Doctor, this watercolor was one of five examples to be put on display in the 1913 Armory Show by none other than Stuart Davis (1892–1964), the American modernist whose work would soon take a bold turn away from such realistic scenes towards angular shapes, flattened colors, and the interweaving of text and imagery.

At the time the promising disciple of Robert Henri and “The Eight,” just twenty-one years old, Davis was among those American artists most affected by the radical examples of European modernism that came stateside for the Armory Show’s infamous three-city tour—a “masochistic reception,” he later recalled, “whereat the naïve hosts are trampled and stomped by the European guests at the buffet.”

Yet with his watercolors exhibited alongside eye-opening examples of modernist painting by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Duchamp, Davis also saw the “vindication of the anti-academy position of the Henri School, with developments in undreamed of directions.” The awakening was pure Davis, telling us a great deal of how he saw through the surface of style and looked to deeper meaning, always staying independent of trends. At that time, Davis was one of the artists whose interest in saloon life and popular entertainment would earn him the label of “ash can,” a term meant as opprobrium for his focus on the underbelly of American culture and the one that came to define the movement of his older contemporaries.

The particular genius of Davis’s subsequent modernist direction was how he went on to integrate European stylistic innovation with his unique Ashcan vision. Through the flattening, flickering, fleeting perspectives of modernist composition, Davis did not so much abandon his Ashcan beginnings. Instead he found ways to electrify them, to broadcast the frenetic American century with the syncopation of jazz and to illuminate it with the glow of neon.

Just take his House and Street (1931), from the Whitney’s collection, where windows, fire escapes, garages, smoke stacks, scaffolding, advertising symbols, and campaign signs all come together like the colorful pieces of a jigsaw puzzle framed by the shadows of an elevated train. Or consider the frenzied cataract of Ultra-Marine(1943), a favorite of mine from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where any lingering sense of single-point perspective is overtaken by Davis’s development of “serial centers” of focus. And then there is The Paris Bit (1959), also from the Whitney, a late masterstroke where colors, silhouettes, signs, and shadow lines seem to reassemble not as a single image but as a long-remembered impression—a deep feeling coming together out of forgotten sights.

So the fact that “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” a major, traveling exhibition now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, would omit Davis’s entire early Ashcan development, and instead start its show in the 1920s, would seem to do a curious disservice to both Davis’s own achievements and the understanding of the museum-going public.1

That this omission of “Davis’s decade of apprenticeship” turns out to be a deliberate “interpretive gambit” meant to “depart in significant ways from their predecessors,” as the co-directors of the Whitney and the National Gallery explain in their catalogue preface, is a startling revelation of curatorial intent that hints not only at Davis’s evolving place in the canon of American art but also at the shifting interests of the contemporary American museum.

We are therefore left with an exhibition that is both required viewing for what it reveals of Davis’s American vision but also a flawed, precariously off-balance presentation of that vision. With approximately one hundred works on display, there is, it should be said, much to be thankful for here. Despite the over half-century of Davis research that has followed the artist’s death in 1964, a complete chronology has only recently come to light with the publication of his catalogue raisonné by Ani Boyajian, Mark Rutkoski, William C. Agee, and Karen Wilkin in 2007, as well as—finally—the full access to his archives granted by the artist’s estate. Through her catalogue essay and wall texts, at least, the Whitney’s Barbara Haskell, our most dutiful curator of early American modernism and the co-curator of this exhibition, gives every indication of a deep interest in the full span of Davis’s development, including the early history. Her extensive catalogue chronology, starting with Davis’s childhood in Philadelphia, where his father was a graphic artist and art editor, on through his life and career at the center of bohemian New York, furthermore offers a singular addition to Davis scholarship.

At the same time, it must be increasingly difficult to propose a major museum survey of a canonical artist that relies on scholarship alone and does not attempt realignment and revisionism. Writing in 1965 at the time of Davis’s memorial exhibition, H. H. Arnason of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum summed up the then-established consensus: “Davis is almost the only American painter of the twentieth century whose works have transcended every change in style, movement, or fashion.” Such an appreciation only occurs when you consider Davis’s development in his own time. Yet in a reversal of priorities that is fast becoming the norm of museums today, rather than allowing history to challenge our present assumptions, the past must now conform to contemporary diktats. In Davis’s case, this means understanding the artist not on his own terms but for the movement he inadvertently foreshadowed—pop—the one art movement, it would seem, that is now unquestionably allowed to occupy our own time and place.

There is no other reason to start a Davis survey with his paintings of illusionistic flattened packaging of the 1920s than to frame him as a pop artist. And indeed, “framed” is right, since there is reason here to suspect that Davis has been framed. Calling these paintings of consumer products “Davis’s breakthrough,” the exhibition narrows Davis’s achievements to one that merely “merged the bold, hard-edge style of advertising with the conventions of European avant-garde painting.” Forget the fact that this particular imagery is part of an older tradition going back to the nineteenth century in American trompe l’oeil and might be considered something of a tributary in the main currents of his artistic development. Why not instead look to his more innovative cubist still lifes, also from the early 1920s, and now in the collection of the Vilcek Foundation?

Framing the far end of his career, the exhibition likewise gives disproportionate meaning to Davis’s interest in returning to older compositions. The observation that Davis revisited his earlier work is nothing new. In 1965 Arnason noted “how often he experimented with a theme or motif, put it aside, and then years later returned to it and developed it into a major painting or a series of paintings.” Yet here this is treated as divine revelation, of what? Pop seriality, and then some.

In creating this exhibition, Barbara Haskell was joined by Harry Cooper of the National Gallery, who gets equal billing. I suspect much of the pop obsession has originated with this co-curator whose credits include a role in the recent Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. Cooper’s catalogue essay, titled “Unfinished Business: Davis and the Dialect-X of Recursion,” is certainly guilty of blanketing Davis in theoretical cant and, simply put, offering one of the most overwrought examples of art writing I have ever seen—repeatedly exhorting his readers to “let us” join him in his leaps of incredulity. Just let us consider, for instance, Cooper’s take on the painting Memo, a mystical composition from 1956 of angular white lines, letters, and numbers folded into fields of red, green, and black:

Let us take the final step: Memo is a Marxist abstraction . . . the Marxism is present in its absence. (Canceled and preserved: such is Hegel’s mind-bending logic.) It has disappeared and keeps disappearing. Marx is a four-letter word beginning with m.

“Present in its absence” might describe much of the logic in this essay on Davis’s “recursive” imagery, which concludes by again choosing to see what is not there in Davis’s moving final painting:

Finally, the loop has a rapport with the spiral, that geometric figure often invoked to visualize Hegel’s dialectic in its back-and-forth winding ascent to the far-off goal (in The Phenomenology, 1807) of Spirit in possession of itself, outside of time, no longer divided. . . . His last painting, left on his easel at his death and still swaddled in masking tape, includes the word fin, possibly inspired by the last frame of a French movie he had been watching on TV. The word is often taken as a premonition of death, but who can say? Another possibility is that the word, like many of Davis’s, like the painting itself, is just incomplete, unFINished.

The great shame of this exhibition’s pop psychology, or more likely pop psychosis, is how its archival research has indirectly illuminated a more relevant understanding of Davis’s methodology. Far from the superficial coolness of pop, Davis was the hottest of artists. He incorporated the visual landscape of popular culture not as pop commentaries but as personal expressions. He deployed modernist innovations such as cubist simultaneity but, unlike European examples, he looked beneath the surface. Mere “visible phenomena,” as Barbara Haskell explains, “ignored what he believed was true about perception—that it involves the totality of one’s consciousness. He reasoned that if his art were to be truly realistic, it must include his ideas, emotions, and memories of other experiences.”

Davis’s recursions were part of these personal excavations that folded memory, sound, and feeling into ever-evolving compositions. This means that his Rapt at Rappaport’s (1951–52), a painting from middle age, could convey the polka-dot paper of the toy store on Third Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street where his parents once shopped—and where he, at one time, could have been “rapt” in its wrapping. The legacy of Stuart Davis is a similar gift, a feeling for the twentieth century wrapped in its own unique, wonderful packaging.

1 “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on June 10 and remains on view through September 25, 2016. The exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. from November 20, 2016, through March 5, 2017; the De Young Museum, San Francisco, from April 8 through August 6, 2017; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, from September 16, 2017, through January 8, 2018.