Skip to main contentAt best, the phrase "corporate art" sounds like an oxymoron. At worst, it conjures visions of neutral-toned landscape prints in Olan Mills-style frames, hanging benignly over the cubicles of Dilbert clones.
Happily, the PaineWebber Art Collection currently showing at the Portland Art Museum under the rubric Embracing the Present, is the exception to the rule. Donald Marron, CEO of the financial-planning conglomerate, has a taste for daring contemporary art and has indulged his private passion by buying millions of dollars worth of Warhols, de Koonings and Jasper Johnses for the company's Manhattan headquarters. Nice work if you can get it.
In a recent fit of noblesse oblige, Marron decided to send dozens of PaineWebber's best pieces on tour to a smattering of the nation's museums.
Of the hundreds of works in the collection, Portland Art Museum contemporary curator Bruce Guenther has selected 58 pieces for display on PAM's first and second floors. Say what you will about the name-dropping Guenther ("Yes, I knew Jean-Michel," he crowed during a recent luncheon, leaving the "Basquiat" to the imagination), one must acknowledge the man's impeccable eye for art.
Embracing the Present does a slam-dunk job of capturing the climaxes and nadirs of its 40-year span, all within a lively physical layout that breaks up gallery space with jutting staccato accents, leading the art lover through a well-conceived yet spontaneous-feeling maze.
The aforementioned Jean-Michel's Tobacco versus Red Chief is here, with its ironic, iconic teepees and scribble-faced Indian. Basquiat's pimp, Andy Warhol, is close by with an early silkscreen takeoff on a James Cagney talkie. Another American Pop artist, R.B. Kitaj, offers a multicolor panorama of Paris, with Crayola-colored Notre Dame rising above an off-kilter cityscape and a naked woman reclining face down on a mattress, butt crack and parted labia gloriously greeting passersby. Does Kiaj's piece, one wonders, hang above the watercooler at PaineWebber's HQ?
Elizabeth Murray's ambitious Southern California looks like a giant apple on a manifest destiny to overtake the canvas. Photographer Barbara Ess' disturbing Snake in Living Room shows a serpent slithering across otherwise innocuous shag carpet, ready to crash some hapless suburbanite's veneer of domestic bliss. The piece is one of the few photographs in the collection to rise above photojournalism and make a symbolic statement.
Contemporary art's missteps are on view here, as well. Allan McCollum's black-on-black paintings are literal and thematic voids. Lorna Simpson's conceptual Polaroids of shoes, jackets and boxes--intended as a meditation on race and gender--make better cocktail-hour conversation than art. And Damien Hirst's banal yet maddening Op-Art dots, with their cloying salmon and lime hues and robot-perfect regularity, induce a headache worthy of Tylenol with Codeine.
The invigorating oils of neo-Expressionists Howard Hodgkin and Gerhard Richter are the exhibit's strongest pieces: sucker punches of motion, texture and bracing color, sensual feasts that prove "abstract" needn't connote "abstruse." Works such as these, with their riotous confluences of order and chaos, show painting's enduring power to jolt us out of our cubicled comas and reawaken us to life's drama, danger and beauty.
Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave., 226 - 2811. $6-$10. Closes Jan. 5.
WWeek 2015