Maybe it’s the Guggenheim or maybe it’s me, but “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960” seems a bore. “Seems” is used here as a critical hedge: The exhibition includes an inescapable array of artists and some stunning works. But the problem—or part of the problem—is how many of the works aren’t stunning, but merely diverting or symptomatic of the time. “Art of Another Kind” isn’t intended to be a definitive retrospective of an era—roughly speaking, the decade in which Abstract Expressionism achieved Grand Manner status. The curatorial focus, rather, is on one institution’s accounting of the avant-garde and, as such, is both defined and limited by the museum’s permanent collection. All the same, certain artists are conspicuous in their absence and too many of those present-and-accounted-for are represented by near misses, transitional pieces, or out-and-out failures. A Pollock drip piece from the late 1940s, a congested disaster of a painting, opens the exhibition and serves as an augury for the mishmash that follows.
“Art of Another Kind”charts the years during which James Johnson Sweeney became the Guggenheim’s director, following on the heels of Hilla Rebay, the original steward of “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting.” Rebay was pivotal in establishing the collection, but her volatile temperament and curatorial quirks garnered a wealth of ill will. (One critic stated that the collection would be better served by distributing it to other museums than to suffer Rebay’s eccentricities.) Sweeney was hired in 1952,