Art Versus Art History
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Art and art history ultimately have little to do with one another. The practice of art involves the day-today struggle in the studio, where an artist, inspired by the work of his contemporaries and that of past artists, engages with the language of art, and toils away until he achieves something that is innovative and true to his own vision. He hopes also to create something that is moving and inspiring to other artists — art worthy of the tradition and of the respect of his peers.
The practice of art history generally has little to do with this ongoing dialogue between art and artists. Deserving artists sometimes get their due in the pantheon, but at any given moment art history’s canon can look very different from the one revered by artists. Today, it is usually not artists but rather arts professionals — collectors, gallery owners, museum curators, dealers, and art historians — who decide who fits where in the hierarchy. Driven by power, money, fashion, and received wisdom, art that rises to the top does not always jibe with what artists believe is worthwhile. One of the problems with this commercial merry-go-round is that young artists, looking to art’s powerbrokers instead of to artists for inspiration, emulate what is being sold.
A new exhibit, “Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” curated by Gary Tinterow, demonstrates the powerful sway of art-historical spin. It is a good show. But if the exhibit had been more courageous and less conventional, it could have broken ground. Instead, it hails to the Ab-Ex chiefs and sweeps nearly everyone else under the rug. The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection has much that could strike viewers as wonderful and new, but the exhibition requires that viewers read between the lines, and that they, ignoring curatorial direction, do a little treasure hunting on their own.
The show celebrates the arrival at the Met of the Newman Collection, which was donated to the museum in 2006. Muriel Kallis, born in Chicago in 1914, trained as a painter at the School of the Art Institute. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, she traveled frequently to New York, where she collected art. During the late 1940s, she bought work by 20th-century European Modernists such as Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Kurt Schwitters, and Joan Miró. During the 1950s, she befriended American artists, collecting mostly black-and-white New York School works to go with the black leather furniture in her sleek, modernist living room.
The Newman Collection represents a rather discerning, catholic taste in American and European art during the mid-20th century. It is being celebrated for its spot-on agreement with the subsequent judgments of art history. Yet, the collection also tells us something about the larger, messier group that was the New York School.
Assembled in Chicago primarily between 1952 and 1954, the Newman Collection is something of a time capsule, and it is well worth attention. Among its 63 paintings, drawings, and sculptures by 50 artists are important, choice works by the well-known Americans Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, David Smith, Franz Kline, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning. But here also are equally worthwhile works by artists who today are virtually unknown to the general public.
Kline’s twisting “Nijinsky” (1950), possibly the first of his mature, signature, large calligraphic black-and-white paintings, is immediate, powerful, and organic — one of the best I have seen. Pollock’s small mural “Number 28, 1950” is a silvery, linear collision of black, cream, yellow, olive, and baby blue. It does not have the frontal impact of some of his greatest canvases, but its twinkling delicacy is a worthwhile trade-off. Guston’s “Painting” (1952), also one of his best, is fluttery, lyrical, and strong. De Kooning’s “Attic” (1949), in which yellows and pinks flicker like contained fire beneath its bruised blacks, whites, and grays, is a tour de force from the artist’s strongest period. Hofmann’s “Mecca” (1961) is a vibrating red-orange field in which planes interlock, shiver, pulsate, and vie for frontality.
The show shines on the European stage, as well, with important works by Giacometti, Léger, Schwitters, Arp, and Wols. Yet the Newman Collection also includes a number of lesser-known American artists — artists who were highly revered by their mid-century peers but whose reputations have since waned.
Works by Giorgio Cavallon, Earl Kerkam, Alfred Leslie, Anne Ryan, Milton Resnick, Jack Tworkov, and Esteban Vicente, as well as by Nicolas Carone, Robert de Niro (the father of the actor), and Karl Knaths (all three of whom were excluded from the exhibit), don’t just round out the collection — they occasionally outshine the works of the exhibit’s New York Schoolmasters. Not all of these artists are best represented by the collection (Leslie, Carone, Vicente, Tworkov, and Larry Rivers have all looked better), but they remain strong, important artists nonetheless.
“Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works” had the potential power to kick-start the public’s interest in these artists — most of whom have fallen off art history’s radar. Instead — highlighting familiar Ab-Ex stars, as well as second-rate talents with first-class reputations — the show, sidestepping new ground and ignoring or downplaying some of its rare talent, continues the party line that celebrates the neat-andtidy triumph of a few New York School artists over all others.
Kerkam is a case in point. His painting “Figure” (1950), a swashbuckling nude that was featured in the 1951 Art News article “Kerkam Paints a Picture,”written by Elaine de Kooning, blows away works in the show by Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Morris Louis, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Motherwell, Matta, and Max Ernst. So, too, does de Niro’s “Self-Portrait” (1951), a Hofmannesque picture, in greens, reds, and golds, with the spiritual fortitude of a Rouault Christ. But de Niro’s picture is among six works in the collection that have been left out of the show altogether.
Kerkam’s wall label begins: “Forgotten today, Kerkam was considered a key figure by his friends de Kooning and Pollock.” On the contrary, Kerkam, along with de Niro — far from “forgotten today” — is still considered by many to be a “key figure.” Walking through this show, it would do well for us to keep the lists of art history’s lottery winners and losers in perspective: Martica Sawin writes in the catalog “[Kerkam] was living in Paris in the early 1950s when Jackson Pollock had his first exhibition there. Pollock did not attend, but the story is told that he came triumphantly into the Cedar Tavern one evening waving a postcard from Kerkam and announcing: ‘Earl says it’s all right.'”
Until February 3 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).