Abstract Inflation

The canon in question at the Met.

- Peter Schjeldahl

The first room of “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera,” a wishfully canon-expanding show of painting and sculpture from the past eight decades, at the Metropolitan Museum, affects like a mighty organ chord. It contains the museum’s two best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë” (1943), a quaking compaction of mythological elements named for the accursed mother of the Minotaur, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips in black, white, brown, and teal enamel—bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime. There are six Pollock drawings, too, and “Number 7” (1952), one of his late, return-to-figuration paintings in mostly black on white, of an indistinct but hieratic head. The adjective “epic” does little enough to honor Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors the standard arthistorical saga of Abstract Expressionism—“The Triumph of American Painting,” per the title of a 1976 book on the subject by Irving Sandler—as a revolution that stole the former thunder of Paris and set a stratospheric benchmark for subsequent artists. The movement has generated both awe and discomfort, like a pet whale, among makers, students, and lovers of art ever since.

Advance notice of this show, which features abundant work by women and African-Americans and a few pieces from Europe, Latin America, and Japan, seemed to bode challenges to the heroic myth. This made me a bit nervous—I was weaned on Abstract Expressionism—but I was also game, as one must