Pop Art on a Budget

Claes Oldenburg and the Morgan's Acquisitions

Tired of blockbusters that skew museum priorities? Tired of art news that veers from big names and big money to cutbacks and threats of museum closings? What if a museum just went about its business—of sticking up for the art and artists it knows best?

Even before the Great Recession, the Whitney had been planning a quiet spring 2009. Two theme shows made a particularly low-budget start. "Synthetic" and "Sites" both took work from the permanent collection, and both felt like missed opportunities. Instead of a bringing fresh eye to familiar art, they left the rooms strangely empty, as work that did not fit the theme had to go. One could only imagine them as the core of two truly remarkable shows—a history from enamel house paint, newly formulated acrylics, and industrial materials to raw earth and appropriation. Each in turn shaped Abstract Expressionism, color-field painting, Minimalism, land art, and the mess of art today.

With Claes Oldenburg, a little restraint goes a long way. No doubt his soft sculpture looked anticlimactic from the start anyway. With little more than the permanent collection, a period of five years comes into focus. One can see the early 1960s again, when Pop Art looked less slick and the happenings were happening. With the help of some loans from the artist and his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen, it even supplies a career retrospective, give or take much of Oldenburg's career. It takes a second look to remember what its informality leaves out.

At worst, an entertaining show like this is a mixed blessing, and falling back on a great collection is not in itself a bad thing—or even necessarily a cost saver. The Morgan Library always shows its amazing permanent collection. That is what it does, and it does not come cheap. In fact, five years of new acquisitions again shows what fixed resources can do. They also again ask how a private collection becomes a museum. Related articles ask about museum blockbusters, museum crises, flashy museum acquisitions, and the Morgan's impressive expansion.

A soft spot for pop

When it comes to Claes Oldenburg, the Whitney knows its limits. In keeping with chastened museum budgets, it takes three rooms for the Pop artist's early years, all with work from the permanent collection. Then comes a leap ahead to the 1990s, for a single collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen, who died this year. It draws on fifteen years of loans from the artist himself. His collection also fills out the film gallery, for the fabled happenings of the early 1960s.

Everything attests to the show's modesty, not least in the spirit of the work. The opening room holds Oldenburg's signature soft sculpture—of ketchup and fries, a BLT with olive and toothpick, a blender, and a toilet. Pop Art often descended like lightening—for Roy Lichtenstein the figurative pow and zap of a comic strip, for Andy Warhol the frightening charge of an electric chair. Oldenburg descends to everyday guilty pleasures, and he descends less than gracefully. The stuffed-canvas ketchup sprawls out over the fries like a couch potato. One can feel a cold, hard toilet seat melting out from under one.

The next room scales up the action to just slightly more comic proportions. A restored, motorized ice bag pulses slowly up and down, like a thinking cap for giant soreheads. It alone displays the artist's talent for scale. Sketches lining the walls show these works coming to be, plus some comic architecture that never did. No, a fireplug never did morph into a Chicago skyscraper. As for Oldenburg's most famous public sculpture, from the giant Typewriter Eraser and Crusoe Umbrella to the even more stately Clothespin, the Whitney draws back just in time.

The back room has memories of a still earlier project, the Store, where in 1961 the artist sold clothing and food made of muslin dipped in plaster. Compared to the neatness and bustle of related display cases in MOMA's collection, the room and its posters look spare to the point of self-effacing. One has to remind oneself how gritty and messy it must have seemed, as if Oldenburg had dipped real clothing in blood. One has to remind oneself, too, that the Store lay just off the Bowery. Only a block or two away, a fancy clothing store has replaced CBGB, and Brice Marden's daughter has closed her trendy Lower East Side gallery. Warhol's Factory might have had a soft spot for the neighborhood's newfound glamour.

The wild, half-improvised happenings definitely would not. With the artist's help, the Whitney has rounded up seven of them, and they run simultaneously on four walls. Although one film runs two hours, most are modest in yet another sense—a few minutes at most. One can take them all in on a single visit. It seems only right that they disperse one's attention, just as the performers drift in every direction and none. Artists and other friends climb out of bed, down from the rafters, up a long road, and down a university corridor, as if in search of a really good party and the summer of love.

Finally comes The Music Room, an extended tribute to the art of love. Its inspiration came from van Bruggen, the writer and curator whom he married in 1977. She had a fondness for Jan Vermeer, especially his women at the virginals. Oldenburg sets a 3D composite into a museum wall, naturally emptied of women so that it can stick to warped objects and spaces. Over the course of a decade or so, the idea spawned a soft viola, the gently curving tower of Leaning Clarinet, and a ludicrously entangled French horn. It also spawned still more sketches for still more plans. He must have dreamed of departing with his wife for the Soft Viola Island.

The soft stuff

For all its limits, the Whitney's version of Oldenburg has ambitions. Starting with the happenings, it wants to capture a critical moment in the art scene. With its beginning and end dates, it outlines a career. One could easily call it a retrospective, with admiration for a museum that can pull one off from mostly its own holdings. It is Oldenburg's tribute to a marriage as well. While van Bruggen makes only a late appearance, he still likes sharing the banner with her outside the Whitney.

The show also leaves a lot out. It says something that it moves so seamlessly from the Bowery to the Baroque, from French fries to a tropical paradise. It has an air of perpetual good cheer, a not unreasonable reflection of a sane and good-natured artist. Yet it assimilates way too easily the mad rituals of the happenings, the ugly indulgence of giant Fag Ends, and the caked and battered clothing from the Store. It also conforms a little too easily to the weakness of the artist's late work, its complacency. I hate to say it, but perpetual whimsy seems to have set in just as his collaboration with van Bruggen began, in 1976.

That year he completed his giant Clothespin in Philadelphia. It pays tribute to his love for ordinary things. It also pays tribute to his formal understanding of public art. At his best, he transforms one's perceptions of both at once. The splayed base of the Clothespin echoes the spread feet of a striding warrior. He is parodying heroism, but he is also elevating less heroic moments in life.

The same strategy infects all his early public commissions, and it makes them much of his best work. Typewriter Eraser has the tilt and bristles of a mammoth bird in flight. The umbrella has the rusted wheel of a colossal charioteer. A Batcolumn and Lipstick (Ascending), neither among the Whitney's sketches, play with noble columns as richly as Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk. When that ambition peeks out, as with the clarinet, it animates his late work as well. The sketch of a bent screw never did become a railroad crossing, but it should change how one sees the freight bridges into New York City.

All his early work has a public side, too, from the Store to the collective happenings. In them, he plays at once collaborator and shaman. He takes easily to the part in the happenings, with his glasses, his intent stare, and the black suit of a magician. Perhaps only a shaman could assemble such loose proceedings. Dorothea Rockburne and Lucas Samaras pass through without making art, Carolee Schneeman without a feminist statement, and Henry Geldzahler, the arts administrator, without buying it all up for the Met.

Oldenburg may remain a telling aside in Pop Art. He shares food imagery with Wayne Thiebaud and a lipstick with James Rosenquist, but without either painter's unmixed nostalgia and spectral detachment. He never depicted pop culture at second hand, like Lichtenstein or Warhol. He had too much equanimity for their darkness or glee, not to mention too much love of the thing itself. His sculpture is way too tactile—and way too immersed in ketchup stains and toilet training. Maybe the greatest idealists always catch one with one's pants down.

Medium rare

When the Morgan Library sticks to its collection, with new acquisitions since 2004 alone, it is of course a boast. This, it says, is the collection that spans art, manuscripts, music, and books united by quality and rarity alone. From medieval to modern, it sustains J. P. Morgan's vision—or maybe appetite for anything on which he could lay his hands. Boasting aside, though, the show is a useful reminder of what museums are supposed to do, and I mean something much more modest. It is going about its business, and it is treating even business as a matter of public record rather than market manipulation.

The boast is there. The Morgan could well have chosen much of the work for its pomp and circumstance. Irving Penn, perhaps the most extroverted of photographers, greets one from the entrance stairwell, with portraits of such posers as Pablo Picasso and Georgia O'Keeffe. John Singer Sargent sketches a French painter sprawled on a coach, his arm raised, like a demand on behalf of both. The public side of art suits perfectly a portrait sketch with voluminous cloak by Anthony van Dyck. Diane Arbus turns her eye away from freaks to such well-known artists as Frank Stella, and of course they look like freaks.

Often enough, the museum earns its right to boast. When it looks for Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, it can still find sketches for Don Giovanni, the slow movement of the seventh symphony, and the Ring cycle. I, too, would take pride in the first issue of James Joyce's Ulysses, even if that meant not getting the sexier final installments, which the magazine hastily withdrew. At other times extroversion provides the acquisition's best excuse, and the defects become all the clearer with forays into contemporary art, despite a lovely Helen Frankenthaler. Red Grooms, better known for funky but accessible sculpture, sketches Rudy Burkhardt, the photographer. He looks like an easygoing dude strutting his stuff, and it only adds to his pride that the two were on their way to Machu Picchu.

The installation relies on half a dozen themes, all too general to pierce this public façade. Much in art, literature, or life has something to do with, say, nature. Instead, the show works best when juxtapositions bring out individuals. When the Paris Review commissioned covers from Lichtenstein and Warhol, it did not get masterpieces, but it did get personalities. In deference to a literary magazine's achievements, Lichtenstein updates modernist poster style for his Ben-Day dots, while Warhol silkscreens his tab for drinks. Oscar Wilde waxes literary on one sheet, hot and heavy on another.

While several sheets will appeal only to specialists in the late Renaissance or Baroque, some artists do share private insights. In a letter, Vincent van Gogh sketches his room and looks forward to time with Paul Gauguin, when conflict still lay in the future. A woman's head in three-quarter turn by Antoine Watteau on his way from Rococo to Revolution or a tiny Book of Hours seems a glimpse past the frame to a fragment of life. Samuel Palmer, the English landscape artist, has a reputation like William Blake as a Romantic visionary and a painstaking printmaker. He chooses a colossal tree trunk on a mound for its strangeness, while lingering over its texture. Its fisheye perspective links it to the novelties of photography and of changing pictorial space.

Museums are spending way too much time boasting and begging. They might be selling off work, like the National Academy, or catering to displays of private collectors. When the Met shows thirty years of acquisitions under Philippe de Montebello, it is advertising its authority and its curators. When museums stick to smaller time intervals, for emerging artists and biennials, they are promoting the latest thing. By comparison, the Morgan's restriction to five years approaches an escape from the hype of the market. This is what we have been doing, it says, so take a look, and see what you think.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Claes Oldenburg ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through September 6, 2009, "Synthetic" through April 19, and "Sites" through May 3. The Morgan Library exhibited its last five years of acquisitions through October 18.