The View From Piccadilly

By ROBERT HUGHES

Three weeks ago, an exhibition of the work of the English artists Gilbert and George opened at the National Art Gallery in Beijing. Its catalog bore a fulsome essay comparing the two "living sculptures" to Confucius himself and lamenting the utter decadence of so much Western art, which "seems to have lost any moral significance on account of its fruitless search for formal purity. Meaning and ornament . . . have been marginalized . . . The black square painting is a goal that can appeal only to very few aesthetes. Not only the black square but equally the crushed automobile, the Coca-Cola can, and other examples of Western cultural detritus, all threaten to take over the world."

Then, a week later, an exhibition called "American Art in the 20th Century" opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It contained some 230 works by 65 artists, spanning the period from 1913 to 1993. Among these were, as you might expect, quite a few of those black squares (Ad Reinhardt, 1913-67), crushed autos (John Chamberlain, born 1927) and Coca-Cola cans (Guess Who, 1928-87) spurned by the cultural critic of Beijing. And, again as you might expect, they are sympathetically, even rhapsodically treated in the catalog, written in part by the show's curators -- Christos Joachimides in Berlin and Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy. "The time was right," carols Rosenthal, reflecting on the postwar dominance of American art, "the market was right, and it was perhaps inevitable that after 1945 the American way should become the role model in art as much as in architecture, popular music, advertising and film."

How true. And yet how curious. For Rosenthal wrote and signed the Beijing catalog essay too. Well, hey, Karl Marx used to say that capitalist culture harbored contradictions. But it took this English curator to bring them to the point of total cognitive dissonance: preening himself as the voice of American avant-gardes on one side of the world, slagging them off as "detritus" on the other.

"American Art in the 20th Century" should have been a drop-dead show -- but it isn't. Perhaps, given the internal struggle between Rosenthal of Beijing and Rosenthal of Piccadilly, it was doomed from the start. It sets out to trace the history -- or what its curators consider the high points of the history -- of American painting and sculpture from 1913, the date of the famed Armory Show, to the flatlands of our fin de siecle in 1993. But it has no intellectual cogency and, although it assembles a number of fine and historically emblematic works of art, it doesn't always locate them properly in the artists' outputs, so that they tend to look like so many flashes in the pan.

A case in point is Jackson Pollock's early Mural, 1943, that magnificent wall of writhing protofigures, its passionate wristy drawing inspired by 1930s Picasso yet unmistakably leading to Pollock's mature style. But at the Royal Academy, it doesn't connect to a major "allover" painting by Pollock, because none could be borrowed. This problem repeats itself with other artists. Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon, 1959 -- that unforgettably poignant assemblage featuring a real, stuffed, blackened American eagle spreading its wings but equipped with a pillow in case it fails -- needed backing up with more powerful work than this show could obtain. And the hanging can be awful; if you want to see two groups of excellent paintings kill each other, take a look at the room in which Mark Rothko's horizontals and Barnett Newman's vertical zips are left to slug it out.

The full history of art doesn't inscribe itself in movements, in the U.S. or anywhere else. Yet this show is movement-fixated; it proposes a kind of historical shorthand, a rhetoric of innovations and "decisive breakthroughs." The curators go on at length about wanting to show those moments when the ball was first put in the cannon. Rosenthal even claims that a new American art experienced "parthenogenesis" -- virgin birth, without a father -- with Pollock's 1943 paintings.

The trouble with this kind of approach is that first isn't always best. The history of American art abounds in artists who developed late and did their best work long after the movements they were first associated with had lost their impetus. Stuart Davis, for instance, was a far better painter in the 1930s than in the 1920s. The full unfolding of Robert Motherwell's talent, particularly in collage, happened after the prime years of Abstract Expressionism, and the same is true of Lee Krasner. (Not that it matters to this show, which includes neither of them.)

Second, there is no shortage of Americans who weren't "movement" artists and yet turned into remarkable and even great figures in their own right -- and these aren't included either. Isamu Noguchi doesn't figure in a show that is laden to the gunwales with 1960s Minimal sculpture; later its curators find space for Jeff Koons' twerpy silver train and floating basketball, but none for Richard Diebenkorn's figurative paintings or even his superbly Apollonian Ocean Parks.

The sections dealing with Pop art and Minimalism are strong and, on the whole, well chosen -- decadent though they may look in Beijing. But the historical structure is lame-brained because it ignores a vein of American art in the early 1960s that, though out of favor today, has a solid claim to inclusion: abstract color-field painting. Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis do not appear and might never have existed. Instead the narrative goes straight from Abstract Expressionism to Pop.

Granted, the old Greenbergian version of Modernism -- the idea that art advances by shedding its superfluities and ending up in a state of idealized blandness, flat frontal sheets of color, a discourse of the medium alone -- cuts no ice today. Granted, too, the recoil from such prescriptions was both inevitable and justified. And yet color-field painting did produce some very beautiful and rigorous works, and it is hard to see how an exhibition that includes six Jasper Johnses and five Andy Warhols could not have found room for a Morris Louis Unfurled or a Kenneth Noland target.

The show gets imprisoned by its own generalizations. It's good that a serious attempt has been made to set pre-Abstract Expressionist painting before an English public. But American art in the 1920s is defined too narrowly, as being "about" cities, industry and visions (ironic or not) of progress based on technology. Its mystico-romantic landscape imagery gets edited out. See Marsden Hartley through his heraldic Cubist-based paintings of 1913-14, such as Portrait of a German Officer, that moving, coded valentine of homosexual love, but omit his later, grandly somber images of the Maine coast. Have Georgia O'Keeffe's skyscrapers, not her flowers. And, amazingly enough, leave out John Marin altogether, however much this may distort the actual story of American art between the world wars.

Then there's the gender problem. Of the 66 artists on view, exactly five are women: O'Keeffe, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer. You don't need to be a Guerrilla Girl to object to this. By what contorted standards of taste could Jonathan Borofsky's flatulent bits of pictorial free association, or Keith Haring's cute squiggle salads, be thought more original, let alone more beautiful, than the best work of, say, Susan Rothenberg, Nancy Graves, Elizabeth Murray or Vija Celmins? Where are those formidable senior talents, the two Louises, Bourgeois and Nevelson, without whom no account of the post-Surrealist vein in America can be adequate? And what about -- but enough, enough already. One can see why there's a big self-portrait by Philip Guston, full of weltschmerz and peeking nervously over the top of a wall. He must have been expecting Norman of Beijing, not the other one.