Looking at these 18 works in a single room is a great opportunity to see that, although there is a common interest in abstraction, they do not really share a common stylistic language. Most of the artists considered irascibles were not a group, but were united by a common creative impulse and, above all, by a certain hostility towards these more advanced positions on the part of the Metropolitan Museum.
The artists used the controversy as an exercise in self-promotion that was self-evident. What happens is that within this NO group there are artists who were much more anti-system, who were not only opposed to the museum, but also opposed to the galleries, opposed to the market, opposed to the biennials, opposed to many other things. And there are artists who, well, evidently are not so interested in exercising that iron resistance. It's very important to understand that this is NOT a group, this is a series of people who, in April 1950, have a common objective, which is to denounce that there are some people who are charged with making a value judgment on contemporary American painting who have a very, very strong prejudice against advanced abstract art.
As far as we know, the work of the irascibles has not been exhibited together, precisely because they were not really a group. There are many artists who could have been in this room and are not in this room because they did not sign the letter: Franz Kline, the Spaniard Esteban Vicente could very well have signed the letter and, for some reason, he did not sign it. Where are all the women artists? They didn't want to count on them because they thought it would undermine their credibility. Where is Lee Krasner? Where is Elaine de Kooning? Where is Grace Hartigan? Well, they're not.
This exhibition allows us to reflect on how the incursion of more contemporary art into museums has evolved. If artists come from the future, then some directors and curators, let us say, can live in the present, and some museum boards, at least in 1950, lived in the most absolute past, also because they evidently saw it as a threatening proposal. From an ideological and even political point of view, this art was considered communist art, totally subversive art.
Who is the system, for these artists? Well, again, we have to think that everyone has their own ideas about this. Rothko not only refuses, along with Still, to exhibit at the Whitney Museum, because he opposes this form of joint exhibition, but he also refuses, for example, the Guggenheim Prize, which he was awarded in 1958, the same year that he also refuses to decorate the interior of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, which is quite a lucrative commission. The following year he refused to participate in Kassel’s Documenta, because he did not want to exhibit in a country that had committed such terrible crimes against the Jewish people... In short, that it is not only the museum but, to a certain extent, the framework of ideology, power, economic forces, etc.
We have chosen this particular protest because of the enormous resonance it had in the press, in the career of the artists themselves. But the public also needs to know that this is one protest of many others, that artists have been demonstrating in front of the MoMA, in front of the Metropolitan, in front of the Whitney, all through the 20th century. And, of course, it is only through these initiatives by the artists themselves that the museum has expanded its vision.
The fact that there are three works on loan from the Metropolitan for this exhibition says a lot about the consequences of this protest, but it is an exhibition that can be seen from two angles: the museum is this indefatigable monstrosity that phagocytes all artists, but we also have to keep in mind that artists will always be ahead of us, and this exhibition also shows that artists come from the future.