Spilling over at the Whitney

Was it only happenstance that made the special, long-term exhibition "Spilling Over: Painting in Color in the 1960s" at the Whitney Museum of American Art overlap with "Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera," the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent reinstallation of its twentieth-century galleries?1 Whether the concurrence was accidental or deliberate, it makes for interesting comparisons. While neither show is a complete account of the period it reviews, together they offer a fairly broad survey of painting from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Some artists are represented at both museums, but with different aspects of their work, while others, including some we might expect to see in both exhibitions, are in only one, so visits to both the uptown and downtown shows are advised for the most comprehensive overview and redress of omissions. The Whitney's "Spilling Over" (the title comes from the painter Bob Thompson's description of how his work responds to his inner imperatives) is the more coherent and tightly focused of the two exhibitions-not surprisingly, since, unlike "Epic Abstraction," it deals (mainly) with a single decade and includes only eighteen works. Yet, like the Meťs show, "Spilling Over" aspires to celebrate the bestknown artists of the period it surveys and, at the same time, remind us of the achievements of some of their less familiar but deserving colleagues. What distinguishes "Spilling Over" is its clearly articulated theme: an exultant examination of the varied role of color in the work of a remarkably wide-ranging selection of artists. For David Breslin, the Whitney's DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, who organized the show with Margaret Kross, a curatorial assistant, "Color as a formal, social, and political matter feels particularly urgent today." But, he notes, "the artists in 'Spilling Over' already saw it as a means to bridge the seen and the felt, the conscious and the unconscious, the political and the environmental."

I'm not sure what "social," "political," or "environmental" means in relation to color. What about color as pure delight? Think about the advertising art and the riotous counterculture and counterculture-inspired fashions of the i960s-psychedelic prints, hand-blocked Indian textiles, and all the rest of it. But however we interpret the works in "Spilling Over" and whatever meanings we choose to attach (or...