The Abstract Expressionist exhibit at the AGO is a beautiful thing. Not just because it's full of beautiful things, but because even though it's not that large, it's really well put together and thought provoking. It makes you realize how an artistic movement gets defined by its most controversial works and artists, but really contains so many more styles and attitudes, some of which are contradictory.
There were, of course, dazzling paintings by Pollock, De Kooning and Rothko that I felt mesmerized and transfixed by, but also some more unexpected things. The exhibit included photographs by Aaron Siskind that blurred the definition of “abstract.” I mean, can photographs be abstract? This at least is what I was thinking when I looked at his photos of rock piles and peeling paint on walls. There were a few Robert Frank photos as well, a poem by Edwin Denby, whom I'd never heard of, and some actual female artists! A sculpture by Louise Bourgeois called Sleeping Figure was one of the most beautiful pieces in the show, and there were paintings by Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. Is it significant that, while Pollock and De Kooning piled the paint on (not to mention, in Pollock's case, adding cigarette butts, keys, thumbtacks and other stuff) to sit so predominantly on the canvas, Frankenthaler used a staining method in which the paint sinks into the canvas?
Also, it made me realize once again how different it is to see a painting in person, so to speak, rather than a reproduction in a book. On the page, Ad Reinhardt's “Abstract Painting” looks like a flat black canvas. But when you look at it close up, you can see shapes emerging from the blackness, and different intensities of colour. It's hard to see what this painting has in common with De Kooning's Women, but they're both amazing and I'll be going back.
