Abstract Expressionist New York at MoMA

Abstract Expressionist New York, an exhibition drawn from MoMA's own holdings and running until the end of April, feels like a revelation. The nonlinear layout of the galleries encourages wandering, from Rothko to Pollock to Reinhardt to Hofmann to de Kooning to Krasner, from crusts of paint thick as a finger to stripes wider than an arm to shades of color almost impossible to discern, from the flickeringly figurative to the absolutely nonrepresentational, from drawing to photography to painting to sculpture.

 

The exhibition tells many stories, including one about an institutional bias against de Kooning and another about logical (linear) progression through the well-known western canon. But perhaps more than most, this exhibition encourages you to tell a particularly private story, one that involves the emotions evoked as you look at each work, as the artists intended.