The Botch of an Epic Theme

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Paris--New York," the show of some 400 paintings and sculptures installed throughout the summer in Paris' new Tinkertoy Louvre, the Pompidou Center, is one of the most eagerly awaited modern art exhibitions in years. Its theme is epic. For 75 years, a deep current of cultural influence ran between France and America, bearing with it a rich mix of avant-garde nutrients. From 1900 to the end of World War II it flowed west, so that the forms of American modernism were almost all based on prototypes offered by the School of Paris from Cezanne and Matisse onward --cubism, futurism, constructivism, surrealism, in fact nearly every successive European movement found its provincial resonance among New York artists. But then, in the early 1950s, the stream slackened and reversed its course. New York was the center, Paris the province. It was now the turn of the Americans--Rothko and de Kooning, Johns and Rauschenberg, the Pop artists in the '60s--to alarm and stimulate the French. Thus the puritan Yankee paying his awkward homages to Matisse's sensuality was replaced, in the commedia dell'arte, by the French Pop artist in his new-faded denims gazing raptly on the neon of Times Square.

It is a long story, complex, laced with irony (as any tale of cultural colonization must be), and unquestionably central to the history of modern art. Until now, no museum has attempted to document it with one mammoth show, and in fact the Pompidou Center is the only institution in France with enough funds to try. Being the modernist showcase of Paris, it is very much a part of the dialectic it now seeks to clarify.

Over the past few years its stolidly trendy Swedish director, Karl Pontus Hulten, has emitted much politic cant about how Le Pompidoglio would not be a museum in the traditional (read "elitist") sense, but rather a kind of cross between a people's palace and a pinball machine--a transcultural, interdisciplinary omnivorium. The real question was how the place might work as a museum. On seeing "Paris--New York," one wishes the question had not been asked. The show is a curatorial botch.

The Only Cubist Town. The first two sections, dealing with the period 1900-50, are at least competent. The history they describe is more settled and hence readily encapsulated. The "period rooms"--unconvincing reconstructions of the Gertrude Stein salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus, the "291" gallery in which Alfred Stieglitz introduced Matisse, Brancusi and modern photography to a tiny coterie in New York, and Piet Mondrian's Manhattan studio, among other places--are tackily made and none too accurate. But the paintings fare better.

Through judiciously chosen examples, one sees Europe's insemination of America: the work of Matisse's American students and the New York Cezannists, the traumatic blow of the 1913 Armory Show (partly reconstituted here, with 19 of its more aggressively modern works, including Duchamp's then infamous Nude Descending a Staircase), and the absorption of cubism by New York, which was itself, as the Dadaist Picabia remarked, "the only cubist town in the world." And so on to the surrealist artists who, sponsored by Peggy Guggenheim in the '30s and '40s, helped provoke the climactic movement of the early American avantgarde: abstract expressionism.

The material here is certainly newer to French than to American eyes --most of it comes from U.S. collections --but there is one sublime group of paintings that have never been seen together in public before: Piet Mondrian's series of canvases centered around Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43), done in exile in Manhattan. They make up one of the most exalted statements about ideal form in the history of art. One gains, at 30 years' distance, a full sense of why Mondrian's fanatical purity and countervailing richness of surface so obsessed his American followers.

But once round the corner of 1950, the exhibition nosedives into farce. All trace of method evaporates. Its level of historical understanding is so low as to be, in a sense, beyond criticism. There is, for example, no doubt that the main change in modern sculpture--the shift from solid (cast, carved or modeled) to open, constructed form--was largely worked out between Europe and America by the way in which the metal constructions of Gonzalez and Picasso, in the 1930s, provoked David Smith's welded sculptures in the U.S. after World War II. The consequences of the change were vast. Amazingly, "Paris --New York" makes no reference to them whatsoever.

On the other hand, the show treats such major artists as it does include quite inanely. The section dealing with abstract expressionism is feeble and disconnected. If one wanted, for instance, to demonstrate the European context of Jackson Pollock's drip-drawing, one would show the appropriate works by Masson and Ernst, not the empty doodle by Georges Mathieu that hangs next to Pollock's Number 32. The dismal efforts of French artists to turn their Dada heritage into American Pop are much in evidence. But it is one thing to dis inter the unmourned trivialities of people like Martial Raysse and quite an other to claim that they have any historical weight. There is no level on which the last part of "Paris -- New York" can be taken seriously. If this is how the Pompidou Center intends to treat the history of modern culture, then God help poor Clio, for Pontus Hulten will not .

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