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Art View; AN AMBITIOUS SHOWING OF MODERN ART; COLOGNE, West Germany

Art View; AN AMBITIOUS SHOWING OF MODERN ART; COLOGNE, West Germany
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August 9, 1981, Section 2, Page 25Buy Reprints
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At the entrance to ''Westkunst,'' the ambitious survey of art of the Western world from 1939 to date (appearing here through Aug. 16) is John Chamberlain's elephantine ''Couch,'' a rambling, upholstered mound that serves as a kind of bed on which dozens of visitors are flopped at any given moment. Its unwieldiness might be a metaphor for the show itself, a sprawling colossus comprising over 800 works by more than 200 European and American artists.

Negotiating this mammoth exhibition, sponsored by the city of Cologne to the tune of $1.5-million and set in a vast trade-fair hall on the right bank of the Rhine, is a numbing, World's Fair kind of experience that leaves one exhausted. Everything about it is giantscale; after you've entered the massive hall, crossed the inevitable Carl Andre carpet of metal squares and climbed the stairs leading to the exhibition floor, it's obvious that the challenge will be physical as well as esthetic. In the end, just getting through ''Westkunst'' becomes an achievement; as you plod on doggedly, you think of Sir Edmund Hillary's reason for climbing Everest: because it is there.

Is ''Westkunst'' worth it? The answer is yes, but a qualified yes, since in it esthetics often lose out to ''art history,'' the juxtapositions of works are sometimes appalling, and the ''Today'' section, intended to show very current directions of young artists, has been virtually handed over to dealers. One looks in vain for the coherent account of ''how avant-garde art developed'' in Europe and America promised by the organizers. Yet the presence of so many little-seen but high-quality objects in the show's main section is remarkable; many significant artists, such as Kurt Schwitters (represented by 18 works) and Julio Gonzalez, are shown in a depth rare for a survey exhibition. If it's important for nothing else, ''Westkunst'' conveys a vivid sense of the vitality and invention of the art of our era after the great movements of Cubism and Surrealism.

This kind of didactic survey show is by no means unknown in Germany; the first few post-war ''Documenta'' exhibitions of contemporary art staged quadriennally in the city of Kassel had extensive retrospective sections of 20th-century masters. ''Westkunst'' itself was conceived in 1978 to revive the spirit of the great art shows that took place in Cologne before World War I, such as the avant-garde Sonderbund exhibition of 1912, which included work by the young Picasso. An early notion for ''Westkunst'' was that it should display art only from 1945, marking a new beginning after World War II, but that idea was rejected by Kasper Koenig, the young German impresario who conceived and coordinated the show. He held that the key date for new directions in art was 1939, the year of the war's beginning. It was the war - or its Hitlerian prelude - that sparked the migration to New York of such important European artists as Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson and others. And it was their impact in America that effected a radical change in the course of American, and then European, art.

Because of its 1939 starting date, ''Westkunst's'' material coincides inevitably with the current ''Paris, Paris'' show at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, an exhibition that traces the cultural scene in the French capital from 1937 to 1957. Both shows deal ineluctably with the influence of the Holocaust and the war, but where the Paris show goes overboard on documentation, so that the art works are all but submerged in a historical context, ''Westkunst'' treads more lightly. There are discreet documentary displays of concurrent books and photographs -such as one showing the Nazis' 1939 auction of ''degenerate art'' in Lucerne - but they are kept to a minimum, and one never has the sense that the art is shown to serve the documents.

Not that ''Westkunst'' is unconcerned with politics. The first section, ''Panorama 1939,'' presents works by artists whose symbolism reflects the troubled state of Europe: among them, Picasso's fierce ''Cat and Bird'' of 1939; Chagall's ''White Crucifixion,'' 1938, a comment on the massacre of the Jews; and Yves Tanguy's Surrealist dreamscape, ''The Extinction of the Species'' of the same year. In another section, the work of artists in emigration from 1939 to 1945 is shown, among them Max Beckmann, Paul Klee (including a comic group of 22 line drawings known as the ''Eidola'' series), Kandinsky and Mondrian. The war itself is present in a series of Henry Moore's famous ''Underground Shelter'' drawings, and in a later section there is assembled a group of 15 maquettes and studies by European and American sculptors for the 1952 international competition, ''Monument for the Unknown Political Prisoner'' (it was won by the English artist Reg Butler).

''Westkunst,'' in fact, is very keen on ''theme'' presentations; great effort has been expended to pull a number of them together, though in some cases they tend to trivialize the exhibition. This reviewer was grateful, for example, for the chance to see some of the contents of Claes Oldenburg's famous ''Store,'' first exhibited in a downtown New York storefront in 1962, and now painstakingly reassembled for ''Westkunst'' from a number of private collections. But on the other hand, does the show really need nine works depicting the Temptation of St. Anthony, done in 1947 for something called the Bel Ami International Art Competition, by such artists as Dali, Ivan Albright, Max Ernst, Horace Pippin, Abraham Rattner and others?

A major segment of ''Westkunst'' deals with the emergence of the new, post-war art, detailing its origins in both Paris and New York. Dubuffet - represented solely by 10 comic portraits of the mid-1940's - and Giacometti loom on the Paris side (the Giacometti representation, too, is disappointingly small, consisting only of his sculpture). And much - rather too much - is made of the German proto-Abstract Expressionist painter Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), with his linear constellations of biomorphic forms. (''We did a big representation of Wols so we wouldn't have to show his followers,'' explains Mr. Koenig.) There's also the work of such influential postwar groups as COBRA, whose members were anti-establishment Expressionist painters from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam (hence the acronym), and a liberal - rather too liberal - showing of tachistes (read Abstract Expressionsts) such as Fautrier, Soulages, Mathieu and Hartung.

The American story in the show begins, of course, with the influence of European emigre artists, and then, in a big gallery, we see the flowering of Abstract Expressionism in the work of its old masters: Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko and David Smith. A strange pairing occurs in a small gallery: two rather insipid mid-50's figurative works by Edward Hopper hang side by side with two of Josef Albers's totally abstract color panels, ''Homage to the Square'' of the same vintage. (The rationale is that they were both done during the same period.)

The show's American content intensifies when it begins to deal with new art forms in the late 50's and the 60's. The departure of art from the picture plane is traced, with emphasis on objects, happenings, environments and such by Yves Klein, Rauschenberg, Arman, Cesar, Christo, Tinguely, John Cage and Allan Kaprow. The later trends - Color-field painting, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art - are touched on, along with such European movements as the antimaterialistic Italian Arte Povera. The main body of the show ends in the early 1970's, and the supplementary exhibition ''Today'' carries on with the work of current artists.

Although Mr. Koenig's original intention was to invite 30 young artists to show in the ''Today'' section, many creating specific works on site, the money for ''Westkunst'' ran out, and the original scheme had to be altered. With an additional $50,000 from the city fathers, Rudolf Zwirner, a Cologne dealer, took over. Other dealers were, in effect, told which artists' work they were to send, and allowed to choose and install specific examples. The result is essentially a trade show, with each dealer offering his hottest item. The European contribution is big on New Wave painting (heavy-handed subject matter, tackily executed) such as the work of the Dutch painter Rene Daniels, the Swiss Urs Luthi and the Italian Francesco Clemente.

The American contingent, comprising 12 of the 33 exhibitors, is a mixed bag, including the painters Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein and Robin Winters, the Conceptualist Jenny Holzer, the sculptors Robert Longo and John Ahearn, and the environmental artists Judy Pfaff and Jonathan Borofsky. To this reviewer, the most impressive work was Judy Pfaff's fiestalike environment, essentially an abstract painting in 3-D, and John Ahearn's compelling sculptural renditions of ethnic couples, cast from life and Expressionistically colored. But ''Westkunst,'' for all its faults, deserves a better last chapter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 2, Page 25 of the National edition with the headline: Art View; AN AMBITIOUS SHOWING OF MODERN ART; COLOGNE, West Germany. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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