Among Friends: the Generosity of Judy and Kenneth Dayton

A small, but interesting, show is hidden in the Walker Art Center's attic, concealed, I think, because it contradicts the prevailing ethos at this museum.  You will have to walk through many galleries and, then, up an unobtrusive flight of steps to see Among Friends:  The Generosity of Judy and Kenneth Dayton.  Three galleries display works from the WAC's permanent collection, all of them gifts from the couple who were, of course, wealthy Twin Cities socialites -- the Dayton fortune was based on its downtown Department Store, long since sold off and, in fact, now shuttered, I think.  (Once these places were temples of commerce, the pride of the downtown shopping district -- I recall that my family would make a pilgrimage twice a year from the outer suburbs downtown to shop in the place and it was always a memorable event).  But the tone of the WAC is far more socialist than socialite and there is a faint, acrid whiff of old money and privilege that taints the show:  according to the prevailing paradigm, the Dayton's, although liberal Democrats, were part of the problem, not part of the solution and one shudders to think what their opinions might have been about Trans-pride and identity politics writ large.  On the evidence of the show, the Dayton's favored art for arts sake, large-scale decorative objects that would look good against the modernist white walls of their mansion on Lake of the Isles.  The work is cheerful and theoretical and doesn't preach and the exhibitions theme of noblesse oblige is at odds with much of what is shown in the rest of the place.  There's a terrace outside the exhibition on which people are playing miniature golf on artificial greensward designed by local artists.  But you can't get from Dayton exhibition onto the terrace nor vice-versa, it seems.  

The art in the show, with a couple exceptions, is abstract:  the usual suspects, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Sol Lewitt, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and so on.  A formidable assemblage of knobs and balustrades and lathed columns, all painted midnight black, dominates the exhibition -- this is a work by Louise Bourgeois that was, for a long time, a centerpiece of the WAC collection; it was Judy Dayton's first donation to the museum in 1969, presumably because the thing is too large and ominous to keep in your house.  The two non-abstract images in the show are a Warhol silkscreen showing some flowers and a bronze by Jasper Johns expertly reproducing a flashlight.  There is an odd precisionist canvas by the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein called "Imperfect Painting" that dares  you to figure out how it is defective -- I think it has something to do with patterns of serigraph dots that fill in partially (but not completely) some of the hard-edged geometrical shapes in the picture.  Jasper John's "Green Angel" is a wonderful picture, part of a puzzle series that the artist made around 1990 featuring an enigmatic cloud-shaped form that the artist teased as a reference to some classic Old Master painting -- but that he didn't explain.  The "green" in the name refers not to the apparition on the canvas, a jigsaw of irregular forms painted different colors, but to the dense green background in which two red eyes, with concentric circles, emanate rays like celestial objects.  There's a vague hint of landscape at the bottom of the picture and the figure (for its seems some sort of bulky personage) has flipper-like arms and little feet and carries the puzzle-form on its hips, as it were, like a corpse -- there's a hint of a medieval Pieta in the figure.  This is an endlessly interesting painting make complex by its encaustic texture -- it's made in wax in which sand is mixed as grit. (Additional research reveals to me that Johns' called the form derived from an Old Master painting the "green angel" -- the picture is part of a series of 40 paintings featuring that shape.  Johns said that the image was inspired by a green angel in Gruenwald's Isenheim Altarpiece's central panel -- but the form isn't shaped in any way like the Isenheim angel and this clue seems to be a misdirection by the artist.)  By contrast to the Johns' painting, there are three large panels by Ellsworth Kelly, pure fields of color, in which the artist has labored, it seems, to avoid any trace of human activity -- you can study the panels with a magnifying glass and would find no imperfections nor trace of any brush strokes.  There's a serene work by Agnes Martin, six inch bands of very dilute greys and blues, half-hidden behind a dewy mist of whitewash -- everything painted with the utmost delicacy and both exceedingly precise, with ruler straight lines, and foggy.  A 1953 Philip Guston abstraction provides the eye with a work-out in comparing that canvas to four paintings by Cy Twombly made, I think, thirty years later.  The Guston has a spackled surface showing a roughly rectangular bed of floral marks, scabs of reddish paint that seem to adhere to a wall of crumbling masonry -- although my likenesses suggest something shabby, in fact, the picture is quite beautiful, elegant and mysterious with the blossoms of red floating against a grey and white background.  The Twombly paintings are superficially similar -- they are round clouds of reddish paint, some with fingerprints impressed on the canvas and streaks of white through the centers of the forms suggesting clefts or fissures.  Unlike the Guston, the paint is applied evenly and not textured -- it is pure color without any sculptural qualities.  The two central pictures are red; the paintings flanking them are greyish-blue, but with similar  streaks at their center -- a floating froth of color against empty canvas.  

There are some photographs of Mrs. Dayton (who died in 2021) standing proudly next to Jasper Johns and a grinning Ellsworth Kelly.  All of these pictures are owned by the WAC.  If you're in the museum, seek out this hidden gallery.  But it's not worth traveling any distance to attend this show.