A Reframed Corcoran

Readying for New Spaces and New Views, the Museum Showcases Its Post-WWII Works

The Corcoran is on its way to change. A new leader, brought in from far away, is clearing out cobwebs.

The glorious atrium is being renewed: Grimy marble columns are being cleaned and mismatched glass floors are being replaced.

Grand ground-floor spaces, long used as offices, are due to become galleries again.

The institution's gearing up for spring, when its whole building will be given over to a survey of modern design and art flown in from London. It will be one of the most ambitious projects in the institution's history.

And even now, while all that is going on, the museum is a very different place, more slanted toward the present and the future than toward a hallowed past of gold-framed portraits and sublime landscapes. Almost all the Corcoran's galleries have been given over to "Redefined," a reinstallation of the permanent collection that exhibits only artworks made since World War II, and mostly objects from the past 30 years.

There are pleasures and surprises there -- and maybe interesting disappointments, too -- for anyone who takes a look. But those who stand to profit most may be the students of the Corcoran College of Art, the art school that's often overshadowed by the gallery with which it shares its building.

The term is just getting underway and, as usual, instructors are preparing to threaten and cajole their charges into seeking inspiration from the great works in the Corcoran collection. (The rare pairing of college and art museum is one of the school's selling points.)

The cajoling's never easy: The soul of a modern teen is not easily touched by some fancy oil portrait of a long-dead swell or by a grand waterfall painted by Frederic Church in 1857. This term, however, students will encounter "Redefined" and art that's much more up to date. There are brushy pictures by famous 1950s masters such as Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann. There are superb works of hard-edged abstract art from the 1960s and '70s, when the Corcoran, then in top form, was busy collecting local stars such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. And there are very varied works from all the decades since -- works that set examples for how a student artist might proceed and also of the traps to be avoided.

To help sort out those useful precedents from cautionary tales, I asked Alexander Dumbadze, the new professor of modern and contemporary art history at George Washington University, to join me in the Corcoran galleries. Here are some of the insights that came out of our walk-through.

On Tradition

"Passing/Posing," be Kehinde Wiley (2005), a contemporary painting that also comments on the past.(Corcoran Gallery of Art)

BLAKE GOPNIK: Here's a work of very contemporary art that sees having an elaborate gold frame as something worth making a splash about.

ALEXANDER DUMBADZE: And in a sense it's almost making fun of tradition, and playing upon the significance of the frame. What's really quite fun about this is the way the patterns and the gilding of the frame have been drawn into the rest of the work in the background. If you took off the frame, it would be a very different work.

BG: So maybe one of the lessons that art students could take away from this is that every single thing matters in a picture, and should be thought through. If you're going to put on a frame, that frame has to be about "frame-iness"!

AD: Smart art is about figuring out how many contingencies and factors go into making something work, and understanding the context a piece is going to be shown in. In a great way, [Wiley's works] are made for the museum -- ready and packaged to be put in the Corcoran.

BG: Could you argue that he's having his cake and eating it, too? That he's making fun of tradition, but also making sure his work sits comfortably in it?

AD: That's one of the things that's good about it. To destroy tradition is kind of silly -- because you can't, it's always going to be part of your legacy. But what you can do is tweak and play with it and turn it around. Say, in this context, you're trying to destroy the tradition of portraiture. It's more interesting when you take one of its elements and turn it on its head, and make it your own.

On Nudity

Part of a larger narrative? Manual Neri's 1980 "Bull Jumper."(Melina Mara - The Washington Post)

BLAKE GOPNIK: One of the things that drive me crazy is that there's this notion, especially among younger artists, that to make serious art some woman has to get naked. I see it in performance art all the time.

ALEXANDER DUMBADZE: What differentiates this [Neri] from performance is that in a performance piece you're dealing with the actual artist. And the artist has made certain decisions about how he or she wants to present themselves.

It's a very different thing, making a sculptural object of a woman, than actually her presenting herself as a person, in the flesh.

Here is a work on a pedestal, and some of its implications -- of the violence to women, of its sexuality -- have been removed, to some degree, and sanitized by its presentation. Maybe Neri had some larger narrative that he was thinking about, but the fact is, as an object in the world, 25 years after it was made, the work signifies something else.

On Shock

"Madonna and Child II," photograph by Andres Serrano (1989), a figure in the 1980s culture wars.(Melina Mara - The Washington Post)

BG: Talk about what a museum can do to sanitize a piece! The wall text says: "While shocking, this photograph reveals surprisingly aesthetic and luminous qualities." But nowhere does it say why it is shocking. The back story on this work is that the reason it is glowing yellow is because the figures are sitting in urine. And it seems to me there's a real danger in a museum not being willing to confront that -- to say what's going on here, to be honest about it, and to explain why you might be shocked.

AD: Unfortunately, it goes back to broader cultural issues. During the culture wars of the late '80s, everyone got mad at Serrano's "Piss Christ" . . .

BG: -- where he put a crucifix in urine --

AD: . . . so this sometimes puts institutions in a real fix.

BG: They're inviting someone to get violent, if they're honest about the work.

AD: But it is important for them to directly confront that, just as it's important for the artist to deal with these topics, if they are uncomfortable.

BG: It seems to me that the urine in this work is part of the content of the art, and that you have got to be direct about that. We could argue that Serrano needs to make it not a back story that only certain insiders have, but actually include the information in the title, or have it be part of the work.

On Abstraction

"The Beach House," by Mary Heilman (1986): abstract or representational?(Melina Mara - The Washington Post)

BG: Is this actually an abstract picture or a representational picture?

AD: It raises that question, automatically, when you juxtapose a title with some sort of depiction. The assumption is that if the title is something very specific, like "The Beach House," the image must reflect that.

BG: And after all, it has a windowlike effect. Or maybe it's only a frame -- it has a picture-frame quality, too.

AD: This is a problem that confronts any artist today -- the import of abstraction. This is a work from 1986, and Heilman as an artist really starts getting serious and exhibiting in the late '60s and early '70s. She became a painter almost in reaction to a lot of the minimalist work then going on. So it comes out of a tradition of abstraction, but what does it mean to be doing abstraction in the '80s, what does it mean to be doing it in the '90s, and what does it mean to be doing it now? Just that gesture of making something that doesn't have an initial referent -- that's important in itself.

BG: Because it gets people to pay attention?

AD: It does get people to pay attention. But it's also a decision in an artist's lifestyle: When you're in a world that wants you to work 9 to 5, get a job and do something, there's something significant in saying, "I'm not going to follow all the codes of life."

BG: But couldn't you argue that abstraction has become one of the codes of modern life, for artists? Within the art market, at least, it seems a very safe move. It's very hard for me to imagine anybody getting angry at you for making abstraction.

AD: Nowadays, though, I think it's a little bit harder. Coming out of the '90s, when you had a bigger tradition of film and large installations, abstract painting was in a tough spot. If you looked at painting shows, there was a lot of figurative work that people were excited about. And now there's more abstract work coming back. And it might even be more of a risk for an artist -- because you're not giving viewers some sort of hook that they identify with initially, some sort of narrative element.

On Graffiti

Taking a once-subversive art form and redefining its context: Richard Mirando's 1980 "Seen."(Corcoran Gallery of Art)

BG: Students who show up at the Corcoran College of Art sometimes imagine that graffiti is the most daring kind of art that can be made. It's what they see on the street when they first decide, "Yes, I want to be a rebellious artist."

AD: It's something that originally, in the 1970s, was very subversive art, because of what it meant in the city. Subways were covered with it, buildings were covered. It changed a lot as it moved into the art context.

BG: Look, this is a canvas from 1980. So we have it already [in 1980] appearing as fine art on a museum wall.

AD: In some sense, if you want to be subversive as an artist, you have to get back outside. What does it mean to unsettle in the museum, versus taking work out into the real world, and unsettling out there?

One of the interesting things that a lot of younger artists are doing is actually putting their work out into the world. That's where graffiti was really getting its initial edge, in the risk involved in doing it. That's a really important element to always maintain in art: to keep making people uncomfortable.

BG: Traditionally, there's a notion that art subverts to help society. But I remember going to New York in this period, and the graffiti didn't feel like it was helping much of anyone.

AD: It depends on who it hurt. One of the things about this work is its political context: It was coming primarily from the disenfranchised and it represented an element in the city in relationship to the whole. New York was in terrible shape in the late '70s. What people might say was making them uncomfortable, or hurt, was really getting at the things that were bad about the city. You could say that a lot of issues that the society ignored have here made themselves visible.

BG: Could you also say that the middle class has won, by putting graffiti in the museum? That it's been sanitized, cleaned off the walls of the subway and put on the walls of the museum?

AD: Some things can only be subversive or rebellious for a short period of time.

BG: And when students bring in portfolios of graffiti-based art, you want to say, no, that's just a cliche now.

AD: If you want to invest anything with a political edge, and want it to shake things up, you constantly have to renew it.

On Reputation

Untitled relief by Lee Bontecou (1961), who has been the subject of renewed interest.(Blake Gopnik - The Washington Post)

AD: Lee Bontecou suffered from the circumstance of being a woman artist at a time when art was really a man's world. And I think with her works, you can't get over the fact that there's something very uncomfortable about them. There's a weird violence to them, or an aggression.

BG: There's a kind of obsessive quality.

AD: What's important, too, is the issue of people becoming interested in her again now. Just because something has been potentially lost to the past doesn't mean that it can't be recovered. Maybe it takes a certain new context to see it again, to understand it again. It may make sense only later.

BG: You can imagine that 10 years ago, if a student had gone to teachers and said, "I'm really interested in Lee Bontecou," they would have said: "No, no. She's a minor artist. She never went anywhere. Ignore her."

AD: Sometimes you're just not ready for something and don't have the tools to really understand it. So maybe in the 1960s Bontecou's work was hard to get, but now it makes more sense.

BG: But what about the notion of influence? If Lee Bontecou didn't actually touch that many artists of her time, or of the next 20 years, does that inherently make her less interesting than someone who really changed what everyone else was making?

AD: Maybe there's an analogy to someone like Cézanne, who only toward the end of his life started to get a larger public reception -- around 1904, 1905. For 20-odd years, he hadn't really shown much in Paris.

BG: Maybe we should really talk about Cézanne as being a 20th-century artist. He mattered in the 20th century, in a way that he didn't matter when he was actually making the work.

AD: That is the fascinating thing about works of art: They sit here in a museum for someone to look at them, and interact. And then they come alive.