The Thoughts of Color and Form
In the 1950s, downtown Manhattan was home to a flourishing community of artists of the New York school of abstract expressionism. Among them were painters Franz Kline, Jack Pollock, Robert Motherwell, his wife Helen Frankenthaler, William de Kooning, and his studio partner and teacher to Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky. Their rebellious artistry is aptly preserved side-by-side in the Muriel Newman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The gift of 93 year-old discerning collector, Mrs. Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, the collection also features works by European masters: sculptor Alberto Giacometti and avant-garde painter Joan Miro. In a striking juxtaposition, Jack Pollock’s imposing piece “Number 28”, a classic drip work spanning 65 x 105 inches, is complemented by the Met’s earlier acquisition of “Autumn Rhythm”, a lighter palette stretching wider and longer than its denser counterpart. The texture of the twisting enamel and the rasp edges forged with knife and trowel relay Pollock’s creative abandon, and relay a tiny piece of that freedom to the viewer.
Another massive, radical work in the collection is “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 35” by Robert Motherwell, a dichotomy of black and white on oil and magna that screams a political message of the Spanish Civil War, events that captivated Motherwell and his contemporaries. The clean exhibit in the style of the Museum of Modern Art also features Alfred Leslie’s suggestive painting “The Lady’s Flowers”, Gorky’s whimsical “Virginia Landscape” and de Kooning’s “Attic”, an enigma of figures, geometry and newspaper frays. Among the extraordinary pieces is Clyfford Still’s “1947-H No. 1” in the color-peeling effect of the artist with heavy, dark curvatures on a lighter canvas swallowing the viewer into its strange depths.
The exquisite collection includes drawings and sculptures including Giacometti’s “The Forest” with its seven attenuated human forms, which reflect the thinness and fragility seen in Miro’s “Circus House.” Like the modern art of his era interested in the subconscious and the emptiness of human existence, Giacometti’s bronze figures in their over-extended form are impossible to walk by unaffected. Max Ernst’s surreal depiction of the woman that would later marry Salvador Dali and Mark Rothko’s layered color palettes also stop the viewer cold. A finc collection of abstract art, the Muriel Newman gallery is a thoughtful experience of moods and emotions, through two and three-dimensional colors and forms.