Who is a Master?
Who is a Master? "Master of the house." "Schoolmaster." "Grand master". Before it entered the studio, the word had already organized the household, the classroom, the military and the courts, conferring authority over space, labor, and knowledge. In art it passed through the guild and Renaissance workshop from one man to another, forming what art history christened its "canon": a genealogy of fathers and sons. In the mid-century, Abstract Expressionism saw mastery shed European inheritance, when the likes of Jackson Pollock "battled" the canvas as much as the Goliath of the European avant-garde. No longer a question of lineage, technique, or the learned hand, it became instead a matter of authenticity, scale, and psychological force. Mastery had a new image: American, male, and emphatically physical. 20th Century Masters rings familiar because it has lent its title to an excess of male dominated exhibitions. From the National Gallery to the Met to Frieze, it has worked less to describe than to ratify, always declaring, periodically and with confidence, that the question of greatness is finally answered. In its latest rendition, 20th Century Masters looks to Joan Mitchell, Mary Abbott, Mercedes Matter, and Georgia O'Keeffe to chart an alternative lineage of 20th century American mastery. The question this exhibition puts forward is not whether they meet the existing criteria for greatness but what those criteria were actually measuring, and what they were built to miss.
Joan Mitchell's canvases match the scale and physical intensity of her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, though where the Pollockian myth located meaning in the act of assertion, Mitchell's paintings are built over time, returned to and reworked, the artist's gesture a means rather than the meaning. She spoke of landscape as something she held in the body, sometimes for months, before it demanded its release on to canvas. As such, Mitchell painted the residue of feeling: sensation that has been lived with long enough to become form. Georgia O'Keeffe's was a different, though similarly cumulative practice: the sustained, almost punishing return to the same objects - skulls, flowers, barns, the flat mesa of the Pedernal - until looking broke the object open and revealed its essential structure. Less imposition than attrition, her approach was to look at the thing until it told you something.
Where Mitchell and O'Keeffe worked through duration, Mary Abbott worked closer to the threshold of perception itself: atmosphere, weather, the quality of light before it becomes nameable. Her paintings index what the body knows before the mind has caught up. Mercedes Matter made that threshold her explicit subject: trained by Hans Hofmann and deeply invested in the actual mechanics of seeing, her discipline was perception as such: not what to paint but how looking, rigorously practiced, constitutes knowledge. What distinguishes the four artists in this exhibition is the way they propose a different account of what mastery is. Not the imposition of will upon material, but the rigorous, physical discipline of knowing through the body: receiving the world before transforming it, holding it long enough that the transformation becomes inevitable. The word has always done work, organizing households, workshops, hierarchies of greatness. 20th Century Masters does not retire its phrase but asks, more pressingly, what work we want it to do.
