The Jewish Museum’s current show, New York: 1962–1964, is nostalgic not so much for the early Sixties as for a time when, with the art market booming and experimentation in full flower, it seemed that the New York of the Sixties was a sequel to the Paris of the Twenties. Although not as revelatory as the Grey Art Gallery’s 2017 archaeological dig, Inventing Downtown, which brought attention to a number of obscure artists by focusing on the cooperative galleries of the Fifties that incubated the successor movements to Abstract Expressionism, New York: 1962–1964 is a generous show. Conceived by the late Italian curator Germano Celant, it amplifies the triumph of Pop Art, the ascent of Robert Rauschenberg, and the importance of the Jewish Museum curator Alan Solomon. (Rauschenberg had his first New York retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1963, as did Jasper Johns the following year.) But the period’s most recognizable stars share a busy space with a number of other figures—particularly women and artists of color—and tendencies. The signature work is Marjorie Strider’s meta-Pop pop-out Girl with Radish (1963), an image that revels in, even as it satirizes, visual “pow.”
Also present are a sampling of underground movies (many more were shown this summer in a superb parallel show at Lincoln Center organized by Thomas Beard and Dan Sullivan) and various modes of performance, mainly dance. Happenings, a form of avant-garde vaudeville pioneered by painters and pervasive during the period, are difficult to represent. Still, one of the show’s wittiest juxtapositions places a televised recording of a 1963 performance by the New York City Ballet beside “Photographic Ballet,” part of the Fully Guaranteed 12 Fluxus Concerts, a series of actions performed for the camera outside the Fluxhall, at 359 Canal Street. If New York were Paris, there would be a plaque on the building.
Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), the first and most ironic of underground orgy films, an impoverished parody of Hollywood bacchanalia, is projected in its entirety next to Bob Thompson’s painting The Golden Ass (1963), a more colorful and static (if no less sexualized or playful) study of interlocking forms. An excerpt from Andy Warhol’s eight-hour Empire is tucked into a room consecrated to the minimalist monumental, amid austere untitled boxes by Donald Judd and Robert Morris.