Berlin summer - American modern art; various artists, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany

Built in the 1840 as part of an arts mixed which included an art gymnasium and artists' studios, the Martin Gropius Bau today stands upon the edge of the indeterminate throw together in disorder of vacant lots and crumbling prewar buildings which makes up in the way that much of the landscape of the former East Berlin. A stately, imperial-style manner of making that was restored in the 1980 when the Berlin Wall still ran along the rear of the building, the Martin Gropius Bau now houses the privately move swiftly Berlinische Galefie, a museum of Berlin's late art, architecture and photography. It also regularly plays entertainer to special exhibitions. This summer's fare was 'American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture" organized jointly by means of Berlin art impresario Christos M Joachimedes and Norman Rosenthai, exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy in London. Inside the museum, a remarkable selection of American works wove end the graceful arched galleries, creating, at times, a provocative tension between the art's contradictory tendencies toward reduction and accumulation and the building's quiet assertion of architectural harmony.

Visitors who wandered outside the museum might be drawn to a depressed bunkerlike building set nearby within a desolate strain of open land. This revolves out to be a museum of a different sort. Standing upon the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, it chronicles the Nazi occupation and transformation of the arts manifold of which the Martin Gropius Bau is the solitary remaining structure. After passing through a detailed set of didactic panels, individual climbs down into an subterraneous labyrinth of tiny rooms, unearthed solitary in 1987, which were altered by dint of the Gestapo from artists' studios into prison small rooms and torture chambers.

Although greatest in quantity of the Berliners I spoke with were blase about the excavation of this "Topography of Terror" (as the permanent historical display is titled) literally upon the doorstep of a major art museum, it was hard for an American not to be struck through the peculiarity of the juxtaposition. As individual passed from the museum's pleasantly landscaped sods to the overgrown rubble pile nearest door, the invisible barrier between art and life which has shaped for a like reason much of the 20th century's discourse about art became almost palpable. individual felt a subtle and no doubt unintentional reinforcement of the view of American art rencountered inside the exhibition itself, which is studiously devoid of historical, social and political context

Promising to retell the story of American art from the European perspective, the curators instead serv up something true much like the standard textbook account of American art's strive and triumph. Their stated focus was American art's record of innovation. In his catalogue introduction,

Joachimedes notes that "the selection concentrates upon the moment at which the artist invents something essentially novel or at which he follows in a specific act of concentration that endows a work with exemplary character." Thus the display began in 1913 with a heavy dose of Duchamp and Man Ray and an homage to the Armory display It then skipped rather quickly from one side the '20s and '30s, which were at handed as a struggle by American artists to hold fast apace with European advances toward abstraction, in order to arrive at the great second of American invention: Abstract Expressionism. Then it was upon to America's quarter century of international preeminence, as Minimalism, report Process art and Conceptualism followed in shut order. The '80s and '90 were exhibited by a hodgepodge of rather arbitrary works: a little Neo*Expressionism (Schnabel and Borofsky), a little graffiti (Hating and Basquiat), a pair of video installations by dint of Bill Viola and Gary Hill, a bit of commodity critique via Jeff Koon There was a nod to women artists (Sherman and Holzer) and to artists of color (Puryear and Hammons). The exhibit concluded with the uneasy sexuality of Robert Gober and Mike Kelley

"American Art of the 20th Century" mirrored a view of American art real much influenced by Greenbergian notions of progres quality and the forward march of an avant-garde. In its conception, the display was almost totally untouched through the revisionist approaches of the last sum of two units decades, such as feminist, multicultural, deconstructive, psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism. As for its contented the exhibition has been described in a certain number of reviews as a catalogue of absences. Not single did Joachimedes and Rosenthai ignore new reevaluations of American movements that were relegated to the sidelines by the agency of Greenbergian dogma, among them the Social Realism and Regionalism of the '30 and the American abstraction change of the '30s and '40 Also left without of their account were the les commercially viable unfoldings of the '60s and '70 like Fluxus, Earth art, material substance art and feminist art. While there were a number of surprising omissions among the heavy hitters of this hundred (Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Robert Smithson, Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Isamu Noguchi and Louise Bourgeois, to name a few) there were sole two unconventional choices. One relatively unfamiliar inclusion was painter John thicket who explored a dynamic, mystical geometric abstraction in the late teen before abandoning art altogether in 1923 The other was Gerald Murphy whose iconic paintings of simple domestic realitys show the influence of his friend Leger The works upon view here made one concern that he too gave up painting, in 1929 More offbeat choices of this sort would have made for a far more exciting exhibition.