Fausto Melotti, "I Beduini" ("The Bedouins") (1973). Brass, 43 x 43 x 10 1/2 in.

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

Amelie Von Wulffen

Alexander Calder Joan Miro James Rosenquist Fausto Melotti Giorgio de Chirico Andre Masson Alberto Burri Alberto Savinio

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Affirming the depth and range of the MART’s holdings in modern and contemporary art, these hundred works outline a somewhat fugitive art-historical tendency: informalism. The European artists grouped under this aegis were influenced by currents in AbEx and post-painterly abstraction, but were unfettered by Greenbergian dogma—an alternative trajectory in mid-20th-century modernism, as the show emphasizes. in its opening room, paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio are less indicative of what’s to come than drawings by Joan Miró. What to do with a Miró who leads not to formalist autonomy, but to a latter-day biomorphic figuration, as evidenced a few rooms later in Graham Sutherland’s Farm in a Wood (1974)? How, relatedly, to place Sebastian Matta: as part of surrealism’s final flowering (to wit André Masson’s canvas nearby) or as a forerunner of the New York School? Biomorphism’s last gasp or the start of something new?

Of course, he is both. But if, by widespread assent, New York stole the avant-garde’s animus after World War II, a history of informalism proposes that equally important phenomena unfolded at the margins. Instead of Calder, we have the spare, spindly sculptures of Fausto Melotti (a native son of Trento); in place of Rosenquists, the alternative Pop of Mimmo Rotella and Arman. The collection foregrounds works that sidestep any neat schema—by Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Antoni Tàpies, whose place Anglo-American historiography is often at pains to reckon. But rather than solve these quandaries, the exhibition raises more questions than it answers: surely the mark of any show worth a second look. "The Talamoni Collection" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.