Rummaging in the Warehouse

By Martha Duffy

Shows like "The Golden Door," which runs until Oct. 20 at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, are commonplace now in the better-financed institutes of art. The visitor enters to find not paintings but blowups of old newspaper articles, photos and paragraphs of background material. This well-intentioned but overproduced exhibition attempts to present the vision of men and women who came to the U.S. as immigrants in the past 100 years. There are over 200 works by 67 artists -no more than a handful by any one person -strung out between way stations of information about immigration quotas and the rise of the Third Reich, sum-ups of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. The result is an assault upon both the mind and the eye. The frenzy of impressions obscures, unintentionally perhaps, the weakness in the show's premise: if America is a nation of immigrants, then a collection of immigrant work is little more than a somewhat arbitrary survey of modern art.

There are some admirable aspects to "The Golden Door." It begins jauntily with paintings by cubists and futurists, like Joseph Stella who arrived from Naples in 1896. He visited Europe more than a decade later and returned excited by Cezanne, the Fauvists and everything modern. During the three-year absence from his adopted country, he wrote later, "steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity, highly colored lights." Stella was describing America in 1912, and he translated one of his impressions into a bright, swirling canvas that he called Battle of Lights, Coney Island (see color pages).

Stella painted gas tanks, smoke stacks, the Brooklyn Bridge. He liked to call New York City his "wife." The city keeps recurring in the exhibition; it is its only clear image and might have been the subject of a coherent but less compendious effort. Raphael Soyer has a wonderfully weighty picture of the massive foundations of the Williamsburg Bridge with little red Surprise Laundry wagons lined up at the curb ready to make deliveries. In the '30s George Grosz did a series of watercolors: a childlike view of the harbor and a lurid skyline. Piet Mondrian, who spent the last four years of his life in Manhattan, found the city a perfect model for his grids; later Chryssa sculpted Times Square, appropriately, in fluorescent tubing.

Competing Objects. The most powerful New York picture is not of the city. Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother shows two proud, exhausted people as they might have landed at Ellis Island. It was painted, however, from an old snapshot and memory; Gorky's mother died of starvation In Soviet Armenia after the family had fled the Turkish massacre. Gorky remained obsessed by the tragedy all his life. In the years before he hanged himself in 1948, he painted abstract reveries from his past like Garden in Sochi.

Gorky is the artist best represented by the show. Elsewhere Curator Cyn thia Jaffe McCabe alights only briefly and tantalizingly. There are two paintings from Ben Shahn's powerful series on Sacco and Vanzetti, some brooding, seeping Rothkos, a poignantly dapper self-portrait by Max Beckmann painted just before he died. There are three fine de Koonings, including a matched pair, Seated Man and Queen of Hearts, who is a blowzy lady with a small askew coronet. Nor is the exhibition without a few sly, funny notes: John Graham's hand some, bejeweled, totally cross-eyed ladies, Alexander Archipenko's sleek bronze Hollywood Torso, in a stance like that of Venus de Milo.

Room after room is filled with competing objects. In one, Ronald Bladen's 9-ft. aluminum slabs stare down some particularly busy Hans Hofmanns. After Marisol's metal umbrella, Lucas Samaras' chairs of tinsel and of yarn, scale models by Breuer and Sert, the visitor emerges from the Hirshhorn in a daze of impressions and with no satisfying conclusion. "The Golden Door" leads to an aesthetic warehouse.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.