ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512290044
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: COMMENTARY
SOURCE: MICHAEL KIMMELMAN N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
It began with De Kooning and impressionism shows winding up their stays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and ends with the magnificent Mondrian show at the Museum of Modern Art, Brancusi in Philadelphia, Vermeer in Washington. How bad a year could it have been? Not bad at all.
One image keeps coming to mind, the wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, its silvery-gray fabric rustling in the cool German summer breeze, huge crowds gathered around the building and turning the event into a celebration.
A celebration of what? Maybe nothing in particular for many simply curious onlookers.
But on some level, it was a celebration of art as a galvanizing and transformative, even magical, experience. After all, it was the strange, and ambiguous, gesture on the part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that drew everyone together in the first place.
And that, for a while, somehow changed the character not just of the building but also of the city.
The wrapped Reichstag looked fine, handsome even, but it wasn't the look of the wrapping that makes it stick in the mind. It was the spirit of it: upbeat and embracing.
I prefer to see the past year in that spirit too. It's a matter of choice. If you're an art dealer still wondering what happened to the flush 1980s, this must have seemed like just another humdrum year (or worse), and likewise if you're an artist or institution struggling to find money now that government and corporate donors are thin on the ground.
If you are connected with the New-York Historical Society, the year began very badly indeed, with works from the collection being sold off, and it is ending with works from the collection being sold off - all this in an attempt to keep alive the institution at the cost of the objects it is supposed to safeguard.
But I remember other events: for one, an ebullient installation by Jessica Stockholder at the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, Manhattan, with its crazy-quilt combination of junky materials, such as plastic crates, and brilliant, high-key colors.
For another, the painter Elizabeth Murray's inspired and revelatory installation of works by women at the Modern. And for yet another, Matthew Barney's movie ``Cremaster 4,'' at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, whose plot wouldn't make sense even if I could remember it precisely, which I can't, though I haven't forgotten its genuine eccentricity and weirdness.
Nor have I forgotten the drawings of city plans by an Irish artist, Kathy Prendergast, at the Venice Biennale. The drawings were almost, if not quite, Leonardo-like in their refined and obsessive concentration. They weren't easy to find, tucked away in an obscure gallery on the Giudecca, far from the main grounds of the show. But coming upon them nearly by accident at that out-of-the-way site only made their discovery better.
This was the year when the art world took stock, not just at the Venice Biennale but also at the Whitney Biennial and the Carnegie International, and the result was the usual muddle. But who really expected clarification? I didn't.
I came away feeling grateful just for having seen a few good things: Charles Ray's tiny man in a bottle at the Whitney, for example, and Jean Clair's rambling, frustrating but provocative giant survey of 20th-century art in Venice.
As for the great exhibitions, there were several besides the obvious landmark ones like Mondrian and Brancusi: a beautiful show of Nadar's photographs was at the Metropolitan. And an Yves Klein retrospective I caught at the Hayward Gallery in London neatly captured the exploratory, ad hoc spirit of his work and, by extension, of European art in the early 1960s.
A show of Spanish still-life paintings in the basement at the National Gallery in London was nearly worth a trip to England just to see the extraordinary Goyas in it. And at the National Gallery in Washington were the spectacular, huge Italian Renaissance architectural models, like Antonio da Sangallo's for St. Peter's, that for a while dominated the great hall of the gallery's west building.
The news was mostly good from the West Coast. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened, and though each time I see the building it looks less appealing, more forbidding and disruptive of the art, the place is undeniably a huge popular success and boon to the city.
San Francisco's refurbished Palace of the Legion of Honor, on the other hand, looks better than ever; now we'll see if it attracts anything like the crowds the San Francisco Modern does.
Meanwhile, things were rosier even in Los Angeles, where the Temporary Contemporary reopened downtown with a first-rate show of Conceptual art, a couple of blue-chip galleries set up shop in Beverly Hills, and others began to thrive in Santa Monica at places like Bergamot Station and its spunky neighbor, nicknamed Baby Bergamot. Coast to coast, a decent year.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Johannes Vermeer exhibit at The national Gallery inby CNBWashington is among the highlights in the art world of 1995. KEYWORDS: YEAR 1995