For art, eclecticism is a virtue. The capacity to acknowledge the worthwhile coexistence of multiple aesthetic doctrines and artistic points of view--even if they might seem contradictory--keeps systems open and curiosity alive.
Eclectic viewpoints are encountered more often in today's internationalized art world than they have been at most times in the 20th century. But there have been exceptions. Frank O'Hara's (1926-1966) was one.
The precocious New York poet, who was killed in a freak accident at the tender age of 40, worked as both a critic (mostly for Art News) and a curator (for the Museum of Modern Art). In both roles he was a man of eclectic tastes.
Abundant evidence of that pluralistic range is on view in a newly opened exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For "In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art," curator Russell Ferguson has brought together paintings, drawings, prints, a film and mixed-media works by two dozen diverse artists who were part of O'Hara's circle. The figurative Expressionism of Elaine de Kooning hangs across from the gestural abstraction of Michael Goldberg. Claes Oldenburg's painted, plaster-soaked muslin Pop sculpture "White Shirt on a Chair" (1962) stands in a corner near two jittery 1960 oil portraits of the poet by the indefatigable Alice Neel. Fairfield Porter's charming, sunny, deceptively simple portrait is around the corner from one by Larry Rivers (O'Hara's sometime lover), which casts the poet in a pompous pastiche of 19th century French Romantic painting.
The exhibition is a pleasurable, inside baseball look at the nuances of a particular milieu, which will provide special gratification to aficionados of the time and place. It's modest, too, filled with mostly minor works by artists both major and minor.
The abundance of minor art sometimes gives the show the immediate impression of being memorabilia. Still, the overall modesty is effective. It conveys a sense of the prosaic, workaday world in which art actually gets made, and which is often obscured in today's celebrity-mad, blockbuster-driven museum culture.
It also helps dispel a pernicious idea that has lately gained some currency in our increasingly academic world of contemporary art. O'Hara had little formal training in art history, and certainly none in the practice of criticism or curatorial work. There are those today who cling to academic credentials as a prerequisite for what O'Hara went on to do with such success; this exhibition exposes the bureaucratic foolishness of their churchly faith.
