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Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture

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Saatchi Gallery, SW3

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Abstract America goes back to New York school

 

Conservator’s nightmare: Mark Bradford’s White Painting — “wonderfully appealing in its fragility”

Recycling: Paul Lee has a way with cola cans

The Pianist by Matt Johnson reflects the abstract geometry of early Cubism

The title of Charles Saatchi’s exhibition for the summer months is Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture. Abstract is too loaded a word for it.

In an American context, this term conjures the heady days of the New York School a long half-century ago, but no artist in this show is a match for those adventurers Gorky, Guston and Gottlieb, Rothko and Newman, Motherwell, Still and Reinhardt, all of whom were celebrated in their day and are great old masters now.

Moreover, Saatchi’s choice is cluttered with diluent works that are not abstract but robustly figurative. Let me go further and say that even the simple word “new” is not appropriate in any sense other than that all the exhibited works were made or painted within the current decade; very few are new in material and execution, fewer still in idea, and some he has shown us before. Nothing about this exhibition suggests that we are about to take a step into some outrageous or wonderful unknown.

Instead, we step back. I felt that I had been transported not only to the back streets of New York to look at the work of artists of the second rank struggling to be noticed in the Sixties and Seventies after the high point of Abstract Expressionism had been passed, never good enough to become household names, but to the School of Paris in the Fifties when every artist there was attempting to break the traditional moulds of painting and sculpture, and every commercial gallery was backing a stable of inevitable failures.

Who now remembers Mark Tobey, two decades ahead of Jackson Pollock with his all-over White Writing and other significant abstract anticipations? Who now remembers Rebeyrolle and Prassinos, Manessier and Atlan, for their modest breaking with the past? Who will remember these New Americans for referring to such models without breaking new ground of their own?

Saatchi confronts us with artists the overwhelming majority of whom were born in the Sixties and Seventies, a generation now old enough to be more or less settled in their ways and broadly representative of what is happening in Los Angeles and New York. I am inclined to say not much. This is by no means to express contempt — far from it, for I would gladly hang the paintings of Mark Bradford in my house were it not so pokily Edwardian, and Paul Lee’s wall sculptures of discarded cola cans and heavy knitted woollen socks filled me with sudden conviction that I may look forward to spending my post-critical dotage as an artist too.

I like these things — and more than like Bradford’s subjectless White Painting, representing nothing, but imagine, if you will, an explosion in Norman Foster’s Great Court of the British Mus-eum. Less a painting than a vast collage of uneven layered paper, deliberately shoddy, tormented and distressed, a conservator’s nightmare already on the point of self-destruction, it is wonderfully appealing in its fragility. As a painting, it is wholly abstract, yet as an object it is a thing of very physical presence. And just as paradoxical in this very sense are Lee’s little compilations of objects banal and trivial, of which the constants are indeed old socks and cola cans, neatly woven into conjunctions of form and formlessness, the hard and soft, the textured and the smooth. I see them as abstract but Saatchi’s curator sees ying and yang in them, the fetish and lingering evidence of intimacy, and I roared with laughter at her description of a well-worn sock as the “handy accessory of teen boys everywhere”.

The most powerful of Saatchi’s chosen sculptures, dominating the long view to the right from the very moment that the visitor sets foot through the gallery’s grand portico, unmistakably represents a great maestro at a grand piano the moment after playing the last crescendo chord of a Liszt concerto. It is in one of the shades of blue favoured by Yves Klein, the most abstract of painters in the Fifties, and it reflects the abstract geometry of early Cubism, for it is constructed in the triangular forms inevitable in origami (the sculptor has applied that technique of folding paper to 2,500 square feet of blue tarpaulin). Yet neither of these abstractions makes it abstract — it is overwhelmingly figurative and representational.

At the other extreme, however, strips of wood in rectangles leaning against a wall “delineating empty space” revert to the tiresome provocations of Minimalism — surely the most incoherent, shallow, pretentious, arrogant and aesthetically unrewarding of all art movements in the second half of the last century. They share nothing with Matt Johnson’s impressive and, perhaps unfortunately, amusing (not a characteristic welcome in high art) Pianist, other than this pervading sense of reversion to the past.

The exhibition is seductively hung and the light is so beautiful that Saatchi’s new premises trounce both Tate Britain and Tate Modern as a gallery in which to mount a show but a danger lies in its seeming to make the exhibits more substantial than they are (it would flatter Howard Hodgkin).

If his choice is a fair selection of artists and trends then we are able to draw two conclusions from it. Of these, the first is that worthy abstract art must now be rare, the century-old genre perhaps exhausted, new fiddles compelled to play old tunes, for it seems clear that he could not find enough to fill his gallery and was compelled to add bulk from other streams of American art.

The second is that contemporary abstract art in the United States has almost nothing of the explosive energy, aggression and confrontational character of the essentially representational art that he showed us at the Royal Academy in 2006 in USA Today, the precursor to this exhibition. Of that show, we should remind ourselves when we have finished looking at this (there are some overlaps), for between them I fancy that we have indeed seen American art now, and can draw a third conclusion — that contemporary American art is not as promising now as it was half a century ago.

Is that why the artists look back? Orpheus looked back and lost Eurydice; Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was turned to salt.

Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture is at the Saatchi Gallery (020 7811 3070, www.saatchigallery.com) until 13 September. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission free.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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