New New Images of Man
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It was late, and five of us were on a Zoom happy hour call that had already lasted over four hours—a length of time that would not have seemed excessive if we were all together in a living room, but now, in this quarantine era of endless screen time, felt indulgent. We were questioning our work in the arts when one friend passionately asserted that art was “the most important thing right now.” Art is about human experience, introspection, and empathy, she said, all things we need. We had all been drinking, but the rest of us were still too sober to lean into her optimism: yes, there is always a need for reflection and expression, yet even performance artists are making face masks for health workers right now while curators are hounding city council about eviction protections. The human condition itself seems, currently, more urgent than anything art can say about it, which is why it is especially challenging, in this moment, to make sense of New Images of Man, a just-closed exhibition at Blum & Poe that strove to explore humanist struggle. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, New Images of Man reimagined a former, now-iconic, though never broadly liked exhibition: 1959’s New Images of Man, organized by longtime MoMA curator Peter Selz. Selz’s show included 23 artists, all of them white and from the U.S. or Western or Central Europe. Twenty-two of them were male. According to what he said at the time, Selz wanted to demonstrate the many ways in which postwar artists were taking “the human predicament” into consideration, a goal that was very much as unspecific as it sounds. In deliberate contrast, Gingeras pulled together a more international,
Catherine Wagley
intergenerational, and diverse group of 43 artists, bringing some from the original show into conversation with artists who could have been. In addition, she looped in artists living and working now—who are both still concerned with “the human predicament” and also aesthetically influenced by the original show’s artists. Her vision, according to the gallery press release, was to expand the range and “thus more acutely [enact] the original curator’s vision.”¹ In other words, by correcting Selz’s tunnel vision, the show could present a much more alive and openminded exhibition about the human condition in art. As historical revisionism, (new) New Images succeeded in showing how much more the original could have done if the art establishment, and Selz as its agent, looked beyond its own circle. But as a look into how art speaks to human trials and tribulations from today’s vantage, it still felt limited by the shadow of Selz’s show, once again leaning on the art establishment— which is certainly more diverse than it was in 1959, but still not diverse enough. Peter Selz died in summer 2019 at age 100. His daughter Gabrielle, interviewed for his New York Times obituary, observed, “He would say that everything—a somber painting by Rothko or a Rodin sculpture—was about the human condition. My dad responded to emotion.”² This indiscriminant interest in art as a window into humanity nicely explains the wide net cast by the first New Images. In his 1959 catalogue essay, Selz explained that the art in his show expressed “wounds of existence,” and revealed “sometimes a new dignity, sometimes despair, but always the uniqueness of man.” The work also asserted the “personal identity” of individual artists who were working in a time that, according to the Selz, was bogged down by “stereotypes and standardizations which have affected not only life in general but also many of our contemporary art exhibitions.”³ This read as a not-too-subtle jab at the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, and its associated ideologies, in the post-war New York art world. 1. “New Images of Man,” Blum & Poe, 2020, https://www. blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/new_images_of_man.
