April showers bring May flowers, as the saying goes. For me, this year’s showers came in March, and the flowers (and sometimes pain yet always beauty) of new growth made their glorious, tentative reentry at the beginning of April. April has been a month dedicated to rediscovering my passions and reconnecting with the things that make me happy as I enter a new chapter of my twenty-something life in the city.
In the spirit of such, I recently had the pleasure of taking some time out of a perfect spring Sunday to wander down by the Hudson to the Whitney Museum of American Art. My primary reason for going was to check out a special exhibit on the museum’s 8th floor, devoted to paintings from the 1980s. While my formal training was in Italian Renaissance Art History, my favorite professor in undergraduate was my Modern and American Art History professor. He brought Modern and Contemporary Art to life in a way that this hardened “realist” had never before considered, so much so that for one of my senior projects I wrote a paper on Transavanguardia and the Italian Neo-Expressionists from the 1980s, focusing on the artists Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and art critic Achille Bonito Oliva.
Inspired by the evocative portraits and painterly gestures found in the works of Chia and Clemente, hearkening back to the 1950s and the quintessential Abstract Expressionists, I developed a deep appreciation for the urban grit, grime, social and political commentary, and pop culture references found in much of the art of the 1980s. When I saw that the Whitney was showcasing this era at a special exhibit, I knew I had to meander down to the waterfront to check it out – especially as the museum touted the presence of works by one of my favorite artists, Jean Michel Basquiat.
As excited as I was to finally be re-immersed in art, I have to admit – I was largely underwhelmed by the exhibit. There was only one Basquiat that I was aware of, and the rest of the show consisted of largely disconnected lesser-known works scattered among what seemed like attempts at bulking up the show’s quality – i.e. remarking on the “Keith Harings” in the show, when in actuality there was only one Haring and a large wall covered in Haring-esque wallpaper (pictured above) which was, at times, quite distracting to the works of art placed on top of it. Placing a Haring on a Haring, or even a Basquiat on a Haring, skews the viewer’s visual field and takes away from the work itself. On top of that, it was a pretty meager collection that I spent less than 20 minutes viewing, and I would have left disappointed were it not for the Whitney’s 2017 Biennial Exhibition taking up the remainder of the museum’s floor space.
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