The first level of this two-floor exhibition displays blockbuster paintings from the museum’s collection—Pollock, de Kooning, Mondrian— with three-dimensional sculptures mixed in. Robert Arneson’s large clay busts gather in a corner. These self-portrait heads are tame when juxtaposed against abstract paintings: The comparison thrusts the fringier field of ceramics into a less radical space.
Walking through the lower level of the exhibit, you feel like you’re navigating a party packed with popular kids. The name-dropping is intimidating, and you have to fight for your sliver of the room. Even the flat paintings hanging on the wall encroach into the space. The cavernous pores of Arneson’s heads echo the dips in Pollock’s splatter painting nearby. John Mason’s glazed stoneware of a nude woman, “Untitled, Vertical Sculpture,” stands beside David Park’s painting “The Model,” which depicts a naked figure in oil on canvas. I feel acutely aware of the fact that my presence interrupts their symmetry.
The top level is open, characterized by muted tones and slits of natural sunlight. Hans Coper’s stoneware vases gently coexist alongside Robert Irwin’s dotted white canvas. Sol LeWitt’s massive black and white target, a hypnotic spiral, rests on a white wall. You can take your time here, Frank Stella’s Z-shaped wall hanging says. Ruth Duckworth’s “Untitled” abstract porcelain pieces sit stark in black and white against a blank wall. On a floor filled with earthy stoneware, the most notable splash of color appears in George E. Ohr’s glazed vases. His are the only 19th-century works in the exhibition; their convex forms gesture toward the modern abstract pieces nearby.
In each room of this exhibit, objects that occupy three-dimensional space become entangled with flat canvases, and visitors become entangled with objects. The divisions between various media, though present, are guidelines and not rules. Ceramic works do not stand out as an isolated collection here, but rather perform as a natural part of a body of artwork that up to this point had been missing a limb.
—Lora Kelley