The Last Salon

By ROBERT HUGHES

Traditionally, the Whitney Annual has been the Reader's Digest of art; a rendered-down sample of the vast range of gallery shows by living American artists. As such it has always been invaluable. There has never been any real pretense that the professional staff of New York's Whitney Museum, who choose the artists, were "objective." Every decision is an act of taste, and so the Whitney's display--now changed to a biannual, of both painting and sculpture, with 229 works by as many artists packed into four floors of the museum --is eagerly watched for trend tips.

This year there are almost no generalizations to be made. The Biannual is more ecumenical than its predecessors. It reflects the plurality--and the frequent triviality--of options in American art since the collapse of the formalist hegemony. It is long on funk and surrealist inspiration. Despite the presence of august names like Motherwell, Frankenthaler and Stella, it is short on what, a few years ago, New York called the "mainstream." For a degree of personal quirkishness has returned to advanced art. It has been the Whitney's aim to dispel the grande illusion of formalist criticism in the '60s--that the manifest destiny of "good" painting was to be flat.

The weakest pictures in the Biannual are, on the whole, the most explicitly formal ones. Purity has become one of the attributes of highly professional blandness, deftly registered but gone limp and sleek. That at least is an understandable conclusion after looking at Kenneth Noland's Sun Bouquet or almost any of the color-field paintings in the show (a splendid exception being Milton Resnick's Pink Fire).

The Biannual still adheres to the general categories of painting and sculpture. Body art and conceptual art are absent, and one may identify this bias without necessarily lamenting it. There are several video pieces, the most interesting of which is Peter Campus' Kiva--a camera with small mirrors hung as a mobile in front of its lens, so that the screen picks up the image of the gallery and its viewers mysteriously split and shifting, at random.

Deadpan. Where the selection falls shortest is in its treatment of realist painting--especially the garish, deadpan, airbrush realism which has been so assiduously promoted of late. From this Biannual, one might suppose it hardly exists. It seems odd, for instance, that any committee could make a survey of recent American painting and exclude the huge, photographically detailed portrait heads of Chuck Close (TIME, Jan. 31, 1972) for which imbecilities like Tom Wesselmann's giant baby are no substitute.

Still, there is one masterpiece among the Whitney's figurative paintings, and one grandiose failure. The former is Joseph Raffael's Landscape, a broad view of a bay and glacier, framed by forest leaves, painted at a dazzling pitch of poetic intensity. Every mottle of autumnal color, each crystalline edge of blue within the ice caves, displays its being with the fictive absoluteness of a mescaline vision: there can hardly be a living painter who can transcend reality more effectively by going inside it than Raffael. The Big Bomb is Alfred Leslie's history painting (there is no other term for it), about the American poet who died in a car accident on the beach at Fire Island seven years ago: The Killing of Frank O'Hara. Leslie, an artist of enormous gusto and visual digestion, launched into a kind of secular pieta.

It deliberately invokes comparisons with David--specifically, the Death of Marat--and with Caravaggio's night pieces. Unfortunately, it cannot sustain them (the drawing is too labored for that, the modeling of the strained muscles inert), but what other American artist would have the nerve to present himself in such a contest?

The choice of sculpture is mostly boring, although given the decayed state of American sculpture, this is no surprise. But there are exceptions to the triteness of the hardware, among them being Clement Meadmore's small Dervish, a square tube of black steel twisting upon itself with slow, impulsive energy; a thicket of marble cylinders by Louise Bourgeois; and a delicately erotic wall piece of pink latex flaps and membranes by Hannah Wilke.

In sum, the Biannual can exasperate its public with its "directionless" diversity or seduce it by sheer profusion of choice; it is the last salon in America and ought not be missed.

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