Peter Schjeldahl reviews "Action/Abstraction"

"Gotham News," 1955, Willem de Kooning. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Another feather in the cap of The Jewish Museum's collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the St. Louis Art Museum, "Action/Abstraction": The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl reviews the show from the critical perspective on which it was based. He calls it "more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition," and then goes on to detail several of the excellent examples in the show, many of which come from the collection of the Albright-Knox.

An excerpt:

"Arshile Gorky’s prophetic “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944), from the Albright-Knox, in Buffalo, alone is worth the visit. It is a desperately vivacious, songful tumult, seemingly executed with bundled nerve ends. Ragged zones of hot color, like open wounds, interact with tight, buzzing linear glyphs—fragments of organic life—that bespeak the artist’s lingering debt to Surrealism, all in concert with intuitions of a new, expansive kind of pictorial space. Something epochal is afoot: a dovetailing of raw personal emotion and disinterested aesthetic experiment, Dionysus and Apollo. Those opposed qualities became the magnetic poles of Abstract Expressionism (which was named in 1946 by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates) and also the virtual battle stations of the movement’s great, mutually hostile critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), who interpreted the new art rather exclusively in terms of existential drama, and Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who exalted formal invention as an end in itself."

The show comes to the Albright-Knox from Feb. 13 to May 31, 2009.

--Colin Dabkowski