"Picasso and American Art," Sept. 28, 2006-Jan. 28, 2007, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021

All four of the big New York art museums have their go-to modernist movements and guys (it’s always guys, but that’s another story) -- an ism or artist that brings in the crowds, pads the coffers, and keeps trustees happy. It’s easy to discern which museums have which sugar daddies. Since the art-going public has never seen an Impressionist it didn’t like, the Met has Impressionism. The Guggenheim’s main man has traditionally been Kandinsky. MoMA, of course, has its Mantle and Mays, the twin peaks of modernism: Picasso and Matisse, the ravenous and the ravishing, the truculent and the succulent, Dr. Rupture and Mr. Rapture.

The Whitney’s beloved has always been Edward Hopper. At the moment, however, the Whitney is trying to upset the balance of museum power by muscling in on the Modern’s territory with a third-rate mishmash called "Picasso and American Art." Of course the show has masterpieces. The problem is this simplistic pastiche sets out to prove what virtually everyone already knows: Picasso influenced American artists. Thus, we get works by Hartley, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, and Johns hung near similar-looking Picassos. Never mind that the show is as haphazard as a storage bin; all you get are resemblances and echoes.

At no point are you given a hint of the struggle that actually unfolded: The suicidal desperation of American artists who felt so hopelessly out of art history that they willfully digested lethal doses of another person’s style (Picasso’s), then after years of stalemate, transmuted this esthetic matter into something new.

Instead, we’re given academic art history. It would have been more instructive to do an exhibition called "Stuart Davis and American Art." Davis was the first artist to translate Picasso into an original proto-Pop American idiom. Or a show centered around Marsden Hartley, who in the teens arrived at his own homoerotic visionary Cubism. Gorky’s flipped-out adulatory relationship with Picasso might make for a boring exhibition but it’s still an amazing story: Rather than going around the Spanish supernova -- as others tried -- Gorky went directly through the cloud itself and in the 1930s miraculously emerged on the other side with an original style that led directly to Abstract Expressionism. The show could have gotten really juicy by demonstrating that while de Kooning was influenced by Picasso, the ravenous Spaniard, ever on the prowl for fresh meat, pillaged him in the 1950s and produced some of the wildest work of his career.

None of that is here. "Picasso and American Art" fosters a totally misleading, absolutely antiquated one-guy one-God theory of art history. Everyone knows that Picasso influenced everything, but Picasso didn’t act alone. He was influenced by everyone as well. Modernism wasn’t a two-way street; it was a 10,000-way street.

For a smart, hungry institution to do this show at this moment is especially backwards now that it’s clear that New York’s big museums are in trouble. MoMA’s new building is lovely but far too small, and the place is stuck with a masterpieces-only classic-rock distortion of history; the Guggenheim, run by a kind of dictator who could have done anything, is sadly more intent on building elsewhere than here. The Met is like the Kremlin and we don’t know yet what the New Museum’s still-incomplete, clean new building on the Bowery will be -- although I fear that this great renegade institution may try too hard to be a "good little museum" rather than the wild card it should be. That leaves the Whitney.

As luck would have it, the Whitney is now being presented with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do something extraordinary -- something so sweeping, thrilling, and bold that it would change the face of American culture overnight and help bring about the esthetic revolution that must take place soon within American art institutions. After five desultory years under other leadership, the Whitney cleaned house in 2003, hiring new director Adam Weinberg, who brought on a number of excellent people, including associate director Donna De Salvo from Tate Modern. Things were improving. Then last summer another of the Whitney’s plans for an addition to its Madison Avenue flagship was vetoed by another civic agency. This brings us to a crossroads.

Before we come to this "crossroads," however, there’s a problem: Five days after this Whitney column was posted on the on-line version of the Village Voice, events changed and made what I wrote seem like I was only catching up. In reality, I was, I swear, out in front of events. Suddenly, the Dia Center for the Arts announced that it was pulling out of a building a new home at the southern end of the High Line at 820 Washington Street, in the West Village. Apparently, the minute Dia told the city it did not want the building, the Whitney started thinking about taking Dia’s place; or the city started talking to the Whitney. Either way, within a 48-hour period, the possible futures of two major New York art institutions seemed to abruptly change. As a result I’ve made a few slight changes to this column. The crux of my argument is the exact same, and the same as the argument I made about the Whitney in 1999, 2000, and on and off ever since.

The Whitney could at this moment electrify everyone by changing the game entirely. It should take a page from London’s enormous, and enormously fantastic-for-art, Tate Modern. Rather than continuing its uphill battle of trying to build an uptown addition that will be outdated the day it opens, the Whitney should rethink its paradigm and reinvent itself.

The Whitney’s Madison Avenue building should be devoted to American art only up to 1990. The museum should then take the fabulously audacious and adventurous step of finding and renovating a gigantic old building on the far West Side of Manhattan, somewhere between Tribeca and 57th Street. There, in what one hopes would be hundreds of thousands of square feet, the museum could create a huge five- or six-story horizontal Whitney Modern devoted to art since 1990, with emphasis on recent and contemporary art. This would simultaneously serve art, the art world and the public. It would also risk failing flamboyantly. But museum culture in New York is in such dire straits that there is in fact little to loose.

Since 2003, the Whitney has tried to send the message that it wants to be the art world’s museum. This daring bifurcation-renovation is a way to make that happen. If the Whitney and its intrepid board have the nerve to allow their excellent architect Renzo Piano to renovate a massive old building -- even a gigantic Quonset hut would do -- and create ample space for its collection and for recent and contemporary art, it would change everything. It would be a colossal vote of confidence in contemporary art and a tremendous thank-you to all you people who, over the last 25 years, have made New York such an amazing place for art. If the Whitney builds that, we will come.

Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker was a hero of do-it-yourself esthetic rabble-rousing. She changed the art world a little bit -- which is a lot. On October 17, Tucker died at her home in Santa Barbara, California. She was 66 and had been living with cancer.

Tucker’s story is legend in the art world: In 1975, as curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art, she organized a Richard Tuttle exhibition. The show was trounced by critics; museum trustees and higher-ups turned on her; she was canned. Then, Tucker did something people often talk about doing but rarely do. She started her own place called the New Museum, an upstart institution dedicated to contemporary art that was the last alternative museum of its kind formed in New York. Nudge-nudge, young disgruntled museum people.

Tucker created something lasting, chaotic and effective. As she put it in 1998, "Richard Tuttle ruined my life." Of course, she meant that in a sense he made her life. Tucker also excelled at ending things. In 1997, after 22 years of directing her beloved institution, she did another thing people don’t do much: She voluntarily stepped aside. Nudge-nudge, museum people everywhere, and I suppose also art critics. Like I said, Tucker was a hero.

JERRY SALTZ is art critic for the Village Voice, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at Jsaltz@VillageVoice.com