Hauser & Wirth already has premises that could pass as a museum at its Chelsea venue; now, with the display of works from the Onnasch collection, it has art of a caliber that would keep most museum-goers happy, especially if their taste ranges from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art with a heavy emphasis on the space in between. Reinhard Onnasch was the first post-war German dealer to open a space in New York, braving the economic collapse of the city in 1973 with Gerhard Richter’s American debut, while also showing Americans there and in his Berlin space. He was by all accounts the kind of dealer loath to part with works, amassing an extraordinary personal collection that no cynic could describe as left-over stock. While the show stopper of this sampling by former LA Moca chief curator Paul Schimmel, now a partner with Hauser & Wirth on the West Coast, is Barnett Newman’s Uriel (1955), keeping company with riveting works by Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and Kenneth Noland, it is works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg (his “Pilgrim” of 1960 with an actual chair sprouting from the canvas) and this marvelous monster of autobiographical alloverness by Larry Rivers that shift the emphasis to an unlikely-seeming middle ground between the quotidian and the sublime. The expressionistic facture of these artists – to borrow a title from a show Schimmel himself put together in 1992 – can be characterized as “hand-painted pop”. DAVID COHEN
Re-View: Onnasch Collection on view through April 12 at 511 West 18th Street
Larry Rivers, The Journey, 1956?. Oil on canvas, 104 x 115 inches © Estate of Larry Rivers/ DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2013 Courtesy Onnasch Collection
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