“New York: 1962-1964” Captures More than a Time and Place

The exhibition evokes midcentury Gotham itself. Visitors are greeted at the entrance by a photomural of a liquor store on the Bowery. Just beyond that, an arrangement of images by masters of street photography such as Diane Arbus, Roy Decarava, and Garry Winogrand, provide glimpses of the Mad Men era metropolis, while nearby, shelves display contemporaneous art periodicals, and published writings by leading authors such as Amiri Baraka and Frank O’Hara.

At this point, those who knew New York before it became a playground for the one percent may experience pangs of heartache. Though the Big Apple was far from perfect back then, it hadn’t yet slipped to its hollowed-out, 1970s nadir, and it still possessed a humming manufacturing base, a bustling commercial waterfront, and a significant middle class that included a large constituency of museumgoers. These conditions shaped the “new art” as Solomon called it.

According to Solomon, what made it new was the “relish” with which artists tackled “the visual environment and…aesthetic experience for 99 percent of Americans.” In other words, the postwar culture of mass consumption conditioned by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, a trend that marked a decisive break with Abstract Expressionism’s psychosexual dramatics. 

Just as the Abstract Expressionists looked inward for their work, the artists encouraged by Solomon (and coevals such as gallerist Sidney Janis and curator Lawrence Alloway) gazed outward to a city where materials could be harvested from the sidewalks, and inspiration could come from the ceaseless stimulation of billboards, newsstand magazines, theater marquees, TVs playing from appliance shops, and department store windows.

Although we’d call this aesthetic Pop Art today, the label hadn’t quite stuck yet, and Solomon’s definition of “new” extended to assemblage as well as to image appropriation. Both are evident in the cracked-glass panel attached to James Rosenquist’s Sightseeing (1962), and in the paint-spattered trio of the eponymous bottles in Robert Rauschenberg’s Coca-Cola Plan (1958).

As noted above, Solomon also championed abstraction, albeit in a cerebral form exemplified here by Noland’s Spread (1958), a pulsating yellow-and-green target, and by Anne Truitt’s North (1963), a large, black, rectangular block that presages the work of Richard Serra.

Truitt is one of several women artists present who were often exhibited originally as lone female participants in otherwise male-dominated shows. Seeing them in force, however, makes it abundantly clear just how vital their contributions were. In this respect, two works stand out: A funky, wood-carved self-portrait by Marisol Escobar, whose hydra-like array of heads depicts different facets of the artist’s personality; and Marjorie Strider’s comic book-style rendering of a woman’s face holding a three-dimensional relief of a radish between her teeth.

The final room of New York: 1962-1964 revisits the 1964 Venice Biennale, organized by Solomon, in which Rauschenberg won the first Grand Prize awarded to an American artist. Indubitably, the honor belonged to Rauschenberg, but it was less directly a tribute not only to Solomon and The Jewish Museum, but also to a New York that, like the art produced there, had reached its twentieth-century zenith.