Abstract painting, especially of the intuitive kind practiced by Morton, is a precarious endeavor today, as perhaps it always was. There is so much of it out there. But most of it feels stuck, as its earliest detractors warned it would be, in one cul-de-sac or another - narcissist self-expression, decoration, minimalism, mechanical referencing of the past - playing out moves that were long ago exhausted.
Great abstract artists have always found their way out of this cul-de-sac. Indeed, it may be that the scramble to get out is the chief source of abstraction’s ongoing drama. Here, unfortunately, though you feel Morton hunting for it, there’s no sense of drama at all.
The new wing’s smaller exhibition space - a kind of elongated foyer that you pass through to get into Morton’s show - contains a sampling of works from the museum’s artist-in-residence program, now 20 years old. It kicks off with a throwback to Gardner’s day - a haunting watercolor portrait of a frail Mrs. Gardner by John Singer Sargent, who was the first artist to take up residence at Fenway Court.
All the other works are more contemporary, and range from a photograph by Abelardo Morell to a huge wall-work made from grass by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. Together, they don’t really amount to a show - there’s not enough room for that - but they remind us of a program that director Anne Hawley and curator Cavalchini take very seriously, and which has benefited from some very sharp curators in the past: first Jill Medvedow, the current Institute of Contemporary Art director, and then Jennifer Gross, now a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery.
I suspect the program would benefit from removing some of the parameters, explicit or otherwise, that appear to limit it. It would be wise, for instance, to relax the emphasis Cavalchini has lately placed on showing artists with some connection to Italy.
And it would be even better to choose artists who will be confident enough to make exactly what they want to make, rather than feeling obliged to respond in obliquely reverential ways to the museum and its storied history, as the majority of artists included here have done.
There is something lazy and vaguely kitsch, after all, about art that derives its raison d’etre largely from the institution that sponsors it. If Cavalchini placed a ban on art that “referenced” or alluded to this or that aspect of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s life, or the museum’s Titian room, or its tiled floors – who knows? – some more consequential art might result.
