Sunday, October 15, 2006
Is art democratic?
The Jewish Museum was closed today for Simchat Torah, so I missed a chance to check out the Masters of American Comics. However, a visit to the Whitney provided me with the gift of seeing two--no three--soulful works by Stuart Davis, Phillip Guston and Helen Frankenthaler. As part of the museum's two exhibits on Picasso and abstract expressionism, these paintings were luminous, musical and (gratefully!) accessible. Writing about Davis and his contemporaries, noted art historian Barbara Haskell once commented:
"During the Depression...Stuart Davis tried to argue that abstract art was inherently socialist, and something about the geometric equality of these forms that he brought together, and that his fellow abstractionists brought together on the canvas, made a political statement. This gradually evolved into the notion of freedom, artistic freedom equating with political freedom, and that artists were able to make such a statement represented the epitome of American freedom and democracy."
