Representatives from the Wexner Center are downplaying the all-encompassing reputation of their new exhibit, “From Pop to Now: Selections From the Sonnabend Collection,” using words like “personal” and “idiosyncratic” to describe the show.
Still, it’s hard not to think of the project in bigger terms.
Names like Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Judd have a way of inspiring awe, particularly when sharing the same wall space. That these artists came together – in the current exhibition, as well as in the public consciousness – is largely the result of 40 years of patronage by Illeana Sonnabend, the Doyenne of Pop Art whose life’s work produced the exhibit.
“There are very few individual collectors or gallery owners who’ve had such an impact on the field as Illeana Sonnabend has,” said Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center. “From a historical standpoint, it’s fair to say this show displays more works from the legends of contemporary art than any other (Wexner Center) exhibit ever has.”
Sonnabend’s private collection is said to be so voluminous it has never been catalogued or appraised. The 81 pieces in “From Pop to Now” are a prominent sampling of those works, yet this is only the second time a significant portion of the catalogue has been shown, following a 1987 stint in Princeton, N.J.
Exhibition director Charles Stainback, who met Sonnabend while working at the International Center of Photography in New York City, proposed the project to his longtime friend after being hired as director of the newly constructed Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
“I inherited a program that had no program,” Stainback said. “So the challenge to me was in bringing about an exhibit that would achieve national and international attention in the first year or two. I invited (Sonnabend) to see the construction of the building, and we shook hands on the deal right there.”
After putting in a request to host the exhibit after its initial run in Saratoga Springs, the Wexner Center was chosen as the first stop in a national tour moving from Columbus to the Milwaukee Art Museum on Feb. 2, and to other destinations thereafter.
It is obvious why both Stainback and the Wexner Center had sights on the collection: The show is a veritable record of the contemporary art world – at least as experienced by Sonnabend and her former husband, Leo Castelli, who founded the Castelli gallery in their Manhattan living room in 1957.
It was from that small space that a new group of artists – largely gay and unapologetically influenced by kitsch culture – were given the platform from which they would challenge the Abstract Expressionist movement that had dominated American painting since World War II. At the same time the Cold War was raising worrisome questions about identity and nationality, these men introduced a similar uncertainty to the artistic conversation.
“They were breaking down the distinctions between high and low art,” said Lisa Florman, an associate professor in art history. “It was a reaction against artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who were viewed as godlike, whose work was seen as the height of originality and self expression. The Pop artists wanted to attract attention to the fact that even high art had become commodified.”
Despite their postmodernist attitude, a few of the Pop artists managed to display an attention to detail that betrayed their love of line and form. In “From Pop to Now,” this is perhaps most evident in Robert Rauschenberg’s “Dylaby” (1962), a combine painting tacking “found objects” – a Coca-Cola sign and a discarded skateboard, among other things – onto a canvas tarp; and Jasper Johns’ “Figure 8” (1959), with his trademark splotches of red, yellow and blue encaustic applied messily over a precisely stenciled “8.”
There was more to Sonnabend’s life than Pop, of course. She continued to collect voraciously through the 1970s, as the cerebral tenor of the Pop movement was streamlined into minimalism and conceptualism by the likes of Donald Judd and Don Flavin, both of whom are represented in the collection. Flavin’s entry, a fluorescent installation using gallery walls as the canvas on which to experiment with light and color, is sublime in its effects.
The last part of the exhibition, comprised of the newest works in Sonnabend’s possession, are the riskiest – in part because the artists aren’t all household names, but also because work from the 1980s and 1990s has so often been singled out for ridicule by the critical establishment.
In his seminal book, “American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America,” Robert Hughes levels many shots at this new generation, holding particular contempt for Jeff Koons, the Reagan-era phenomenon whose “Rabbit” (1986), a 300 pound, stainless steel bunny, brings the Sonnabend tour to a close. “Nauseating” was the word Hughes used to describe Koons’ approach to art.
“Hughes is bulls–t,” said Jeff Kipniss, curator of the Columbus exhibition of “From Pop to Now.” “It’s a shame everyone in America takes him so seriously.”
While Kipniss admits he doesn’t understand some of the newer pieces, he tries to keep an open mind. “I’m glad I don’t get all of them. That’s the fun thing – you listen to what the (younger curators) think, and you try to figure out why they get it.”
That’s an interesting endorsement for such an important exhibit, but for a collection that has fed on new ideas for half a century – and continues to, as Sonnabend still collects at the age of 87 – it is also a most fitting one.
“From Pop to Now: Selections From the Sonnabend Collection” is being exhibited in the Belmont Building at 330 Spring St. Admission is free.
