The Expressionist Figure at the Walker Art Center

"The Expressionist Figure" is an exhibition of 78 drawings, many of them tinted by water-colors, collected by Miriam and Erwin Kelen.  These works on paper were originally displayed on the walls of the Kelen's Minneapolis home.  For many years, the Kelen's have been closely affiliated with the Walker Art Center and, beginning in 1991, they endowed a fund maintained by the WAC for the acquisition of works on paper.  The drawings in this collection have been donated to the Walker and the show celebrates this act of generosity.

This exhibition is remarkably interesting.  The drawings are all beautifully made and many of them represent the work of important artists:  there are images by Degas through Kara Walker in the show and every one of them is worth close study.  The Walker displays the collection in about five rather small rooms -- the "hang" seemed to me to be thematic:  pictures with similar subject matter were grouped together.  All of the work is figurative -- in other words, the pictures show human beings, some of them highly stylized, but, nonetheless, all recognizably images of people.  The classical figurative image is the nude and, probably, about half of the art works feature naked women.  (Perhaps, this accounts for some of the fascination that the show exerts).  The pictures are graphic and a few of the images might be considered pornographic or obscene.  A number of the drawings display female genitalia and most of the pictures can be characterized as examples of "the male gaze".  For instance, there are several anatomically correct late Picasso drawings, one of them gorgeously adorned with yellow and green and night-blue watetcolored paint, and three of de Koonings' "women", pointy-breasted raw pink figures with praying mantis heads are also on display.  The entrance to the show warns that it contains images that are "adult" and that feature nudity.  Several sex acts are also on display. 

There are no weak images in the exhibition.  The Kelen's appear to have exercised excellent taste in accumulating these pictures.  It's not an overwhelming show -- you can tour the galleries, looking closely at every picture, in about an hour; this is the best sort of show, one attuned to connoisseurs, intimate and tactful:  this isn't a blockbuster entertainment but rather an understated collection for the discerning eye.  It is worth your time to come to the exhibition mid-week perhaps just before noon or early afternoon when the galleries are not crowded.  The show demands attention, because many of its pleasures are subtle, and you need to look closely, and with focus, at the images.   

It's hard to identify highlights in the exhibition because its general quality is so high.  Several works by the South  African William Kentridge, probably one of the most interesting artists working today, stand out as particularly fine.  The Picasso nudes are exquisite -- each curve and line seems somehow destined.  There are a number of excellent drawings from the German expressionist period including sketches by Max Beckmann, Pechstein, Otto Dix, and Grosz.  More modern German art is represented by a good, characteristic Baselitz (with his trademark inverted figure), an interesting portrait sketch by Anselm Kiefer, and a large and cheerfully obscene drawing with Pop Art elements by Sigmar Polke.  Fine drawings by Arshile Gorky and Matta are also on show.  (Matta's little surrealist personages are particularly amusing and grotesque:  the title to one of the works on show illustrates the importance of the comma:  the work is entitled "People eating, a cat, and musicians").  There are several exquisite works by a woman named Marlene Dumas, an artist of whom I had no knowledge, that are very remarkable:  one of them shows Marilyn Monroe being interrogated by House Unamerican Affairs Committee -- a shadow frieze of male profiles hovers over Monroe's gilded hair. Similarly, unfamiliar to me is a California artist named Rowan Pope -- he works in the genre of photo-realism, but his pictures, which are very ambitious (one shows the liberation of Buchenwald; another illustrates Kafka's The Trial) are virtuoso displays of draftsmanship, the work demystified, as it were, by margins deliberately left incomplete to show how the intricate images were constructed from graphite applied layer upon layer. 

The aesthetic displayed by this collection, it must be said, is at odds with the prevailing ideology at the WAC.  About half of these works are politically incorrect:  many of the big nudes have the aura of being odalisques -- in fact, there is a Matisse work that seems explicit on that point.  Some of the sex scenes seem casually exploitative.  The WAC curators don't hector the viewers except with respect to one work that presses hard against the current limits of political correctness:  This is a 1967 drawing by Christo, a sketch of a nude woman who has been wrapped in something like cellophane.  The drawing arises from a party at a mansion on the hill overlooking the WAC -- Christo had come to town to mount an exhibition and two models were hired to attend the party in the nude.  (Christo, of course, is famous for wrapping things -- later, he was to wrap a mile of sea-shore in  Australia and the Reichstag in Berlin.  At the party the naked girls were gift-wrapped as a present to the artist.  The sketch shows one of the women wrapped up at the party and a photograph in the catalog shows the two of them at the gathering.  A bit sternly, the curator tells us via wall label that after this party, Christo adjusted he attitudes about "objectifying women."  But almost all women shown in the exhibit are objectified in one way or another -- that's really the nature of the aesthetic underlying this show.  The WAC recently has gone "all in" for conceptual art that is intrinsically (and, often, irritatingly) political in natures.  But this show, full of works that are simply beautiful has no political agenda and raises only a few conceptual issues -- by and large, it's an "old school" exhibit of beautifully made things.