Haskell Barbara Hc Westermann New York Whitney Museum of American Art
At the Whitney, a Champion of American Fine art
The curator Barbara Haskell marks 43 years as a curator that have taken her from Claes Oldenburg in Pasadena to "American Gothic and Other Fables" in New York.
Barbara Haskell has been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for just over 43 years. Credit... Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
Artists get nearly of the ink, naturally, only curators are the unseen hands behind all art exhibitions. The job entails a lot more than writing those lilliputian wall texts.
Those who follow curators closely honour extra points for consistency over fourth dimension, and this is a stiff suit for Barbara Haskell: She's been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for just over 43 years.
Though official statistics on the affair are deficient, information technology'south very likely one of the longest current runs in the field at a unmarried institution. Ms. Haskell has been on the job longer than the Whitney's chief curator, Scott Rothkopf, has been live.
Paradigm 
Every bit the title suggests, if Forest had done goose egg else, he would be immortal for "American Gothic" (1930), for which the overused term "icon" is really suitable: the bleak and pitchfork-wielding duo that somehow epitomizes both the upside and downside of being American. It's easily amidst the most recognized artworks ever created.
But that is only one of some 120 works in the evidence, the largest survey of Wood'south work to engagement, including non simply famous paintings like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (1931) just also early on work and some drawings to kicking.
"I think information technology'southward the only one that actually covers the whole range of his career," said Ms. Haskell, 71. "Information technology will exist a surprise for people who recollect they know Grant Forest."
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Ms. Haskell, who is married to Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College, has surprises of her own. Though associated with the earliest artists of the Whitney'due south purview, she has also co-curated 2 Biennials, the museum's survey of cutting-edge contemporary work, and organized shows on Minimalists like Donald Judd and Agnes Martin.
Whatever the era, she's been at information technology so long that her scholarship has securely shaped her field. "Information technology'south hard to imagine American fine art without her," said the Whitney's manager, Adam D. Weinberg. "Her métier is these great monograph shows."
And she has shaped generations of curators. Amidst them was Thelma Golden, now the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Ms. Golden recalled seeing Ms. Haskell's Milton Avery show in 1982, when Ms. Gilded was a junior at a high school on the Upper Eastward Side of Manhattan.
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"I was going to the Whitney once a week, merely that show stood out for me equally a signal moment," Ms. Golden said. "It has to do with my sense of what transformative exhibition-making could exist." She added, "I came out of it with a sense of who Avery was, but wanting to know more."
Just a few years after, Ms. Gilded became Ms. Haskell'due south Whitney colleague, eventually rise to curator there.
"Most of my career has been with living artists, just she taught me a sense of reverence for the past," Ms. Golden said.
Like many successful people, Ms. Haskell was in the right place at the right fourth dimension early in her career. A native of San Diego, she attended U.C.Fifty.A. so started working as a registrar at the Pasadena Art Museum; she stayed at the institution for five years.
At one betoken a curator was fired, and there were few others to fill in. "Information technology was a tiny staff, and I just started doing shows," said Ms. Haskell, who was an banana curator past then. Her first show was Claes Oldenburg, "Object Into Monument," in 1971.
Mr. Oldenburg, who has been the subject field of many exhibitions since, said in an e-mail that the collaboration with Ms. Haskell remained close to his middle. "I nevertheless continue the book bachelor in my studio and wait it at frequently," he added. "It'southward one of my favorites."
Prototype
Ms. Haskell organized a subsequent exhibition of Arthur Dove's work, which eventually moved to the Whitney. The incoming managing director of the Whitney, Thomas N. Armstrong III, stopped by the Pasadena museum when he was in boondocks.
"We had a wonderful fourth dimension — nosotros had lunch, and nosotros went down to the storage, pulling out racks and talking about the work," Ms. Haskell said. "It wasn't until he left that I realized I had been interviewed."
She moved to New York to work for Mr. Armstrong, the first of 4 Whitney directors nether whom she would curate.
Ms. Haskell said that Wood, who died in 1942, left backside a rich trove of work that nevertheless resonates. Iowa born and bred, he began life on a farm near Anamosa in 1891 and moved to Cedar Rapids at age x subsequently his male parent died. He accomplished recognition after "American Gothic" was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and won a $300 prize in 1930.
Most contemporary scholars agree that Forest suffered an unhappy marriage because he was a closeted gay man, though no such words were uttered in Depression-era America.
"In that location was this ailment," Ms. Haskell said. "One understands that he was a young creative person in the Midwest and had to go on that part of himself secret."
Wood'due south undeniable status as an outsider comes across in his paintings, which have a fractured fairy tale quality — placid only menacing, with a dollop of wit, especially when they take on explicitly American themes, as they often exercise.
Two indelible examples are the wizened tea-sipping ladies of "Daughters of Revolution" (1932) and the cartoonish retelling of George Washington and the ruby-red tree, presented equally a diorama-similar scene-within-a-scene, in "Parson Weems' Legend" (1939).
"Even the portraits, in that location's something very judgmental and menacing," Ms. Haskell said. "The landscapes are very silent. The surfaces are so shellacked, there'southward a distance between the viewer and the piece."
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And within Wood's disquiet, Ms. Haskell sees a connection to the present day.
"Wood lived at a time when at that place was an urban-rural divide, and the populist attack on elitism," she said. "And a question: 'What is the American nation, what are our national values?' It's a very like time to at present."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/arts/whitney-barbara-haskell-curator.html
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