Out of the Closet

New York’s art museums are shirking two crucial civic duties. One is to show major artworks, not just buy them. The other is to serve the community in which they live. Museums in other American cities often do the same, but New York is different: It is still (for the time being) the center of the art world, and it was the home of one of the most remarkable developments in 20th-century art, the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School.

Willem de Kooning’s ‘Pink Angels’ (1945)

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On the whole, Europe has America at a radical disadvantage when it comes to art. Only a handful of great painters (and no great architects) who worked before 1850 are decently represented in the western hemisphere, even if you were to lump together every museum from the top of Canada to Tierra del Fuego. But in modern times, the situation is reversed. New York and the New York School dominated art in the second half of the 20th century. In this light, New York’s unwillingness to exhibit the spectacular New York School paintings it owns is silly and sinister.

When museums own warehouses full of paintings they have no plans to exhibit, they ought to lend or lease or give them away to museums that want them. More important, New York’s museums owe the city and the world an explanation of why Manhattan replaced Paris as the world’s leading art center after World War II—so decisively that it still holds the title today, although it no longer deserves it. They owe the world a chance to see for itself what the excitement was all about during the years, roughly 1945 to 1970, in which the New York School flourished and Manhattan glowed with the sheer joy of new art.