ART : Highs and Lows of Kirk Varnedoe : The most powerful curator in the country did his homework for his first MOMA exhibit, but he wasn’t prepared for the reception it got

When Kirk Varnedoe was a child in Savannah, Ga., his father once coerced him into sitting still for a family photograph by posing him with a proper-looking book that had a comic book hidden inside it. Times have changed for Varnedoe, the handsome, well-spoken, self-assured director of the department of painting and sculpture at New York’s venerable Museum of Modern Art. In the three years since he became the most powerful curator in the country, he has graciously posed for dozens of photographs in newspapers and art magazines.

But one thing remains the same: Varnedoe still has his head in comics. The first major exhibition he organized since assuming his post at MOMA is “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” which opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Art, making its final appearance after traveling from New York to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Varnedoe, 45, was educated at Williams College and Stanford University. He has written about such disparate subjects as Romantic sculptor Auguste Rodin, Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte and contemporary super-realist sculptor Duane Hanson, and in 1984, he won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (a so-called genius grant). Like the scholar himself, “High and Low” involves more than comics.

The exhibition and its enormous catalogue also explore graffiti, caricature and advertising in the process of exposing precise relationships between elite works of art and products of mass culture. Varnedoe and co-curator Adam Gopnik, art critic for the New Yorker, did an extraordinary amount of digging to discover the exact publications and objects that inspired the artworks they had selected.

The intended result of the curators’ labors was an exhibition that now fills the Museum of Contemporary Art with lowly advertisements, newspapers, comic strips and illustrations as well as revered masterpieces, such as Fernand Leger’s 1919 painting “The City.” The unintended result was a barrage of criticism that greeted the show in October when it opened in New York.

“Oh boy, what a storm,” Varnedoe recalled during an interview at MOCA while the exhibition was being installed.

Charging that the show’s thesis is “crushingly familiar, superficial and one-sided,” Roberta Smith of the New York Times damned “High and Low” as, “at best, the wrong exhibition in the wrong place at the wrong time. At worst, it may be a textbook case for the maxim that an exhibition top-heavy in masterpieces can still be a disaster.”

“What we have here is just one more version of that time-honored art world formula: Need new blood? Get the lower classes!” wrote Newsday critic Amei Wallach.

“What we are offered in ‘High and Low’ is less an explanation of modern art than a preposterously distended taxonomy of certain cultural materials that have been used in some parts of it. Never has so much miscellaneous detail been marshaled with such paltry results,” wrote Hilton Kramer in the New Criterion.

Varnedoe expected objections. “I thought it was a given, going in, that those on the right . . . and those on the left would not like the show. You could certainly have written the reviews a year in advance. The vision of the left says the show is elitist, it co-opts the true energies of popular culture, it’s all about class divisions. The view on the right says the show is demagogic, populist, it plays to the masses. Those are just the standardized responses, and you could see them coming,” he said.

“But I don’t think I was quite prepared for either how little middle ground there was or how few people were willing to stand on it and look at it. No one could have been prepared for the kind of crazy ferocity (of the criticism). I mean, there was a weird tone: ‘Let the dogs loose.’ Barbara Rose wrote a review in the Journal of Art that was published 10 days before the show opened which already had that kind of tone to it. . . . The New York Times review on opening day . . . had a lot of negative energy and essentially just opened up the pound and said, ‘Go get it.’

“I don’t mean to discredit the criticism of the show,” Varnedoe said. “It’s obvious this is a limited show. It took a particular point of view. I’m willing to take my beating. But it’s hard not to feel there’s some extra factor of energy in that peculiar storm.

“If you want to speculate about what’s in that storm that’s not in the show, then you start thinking about that moment when . . . the tide was going out at the end of the ‘80s, the recession was looming and there was a change in feeling about institutions like the Modern and a change in the nature of public discourse in the press, which goes back to the election. There is a context in which this phenomenon could be seen as related not just to the local incidents but to a general climate.”

The subject of “High and Low” itself “has a lot of political voltage to it” partly because “virtually everyone feels empowered as an expert” on popular culture, he said. In addition, pent-up anger over a perception that MOMA hadn’t been acutely attuned to contemporary art for the last 20 years was due to explode, he noted.

To make matters worse, Varnedoe’s appointment was controversial. Conservatives view him as a radical revisionist. Kramer, for one, has worried in print whether MOMA can survive his tenure, in a New Criterion article called “The Varnedoe Debacle.” Leftists and postmodernist theoreticians, on the other hand, have characterized Varnedoe as a disappointing member of the old guard who can’t be expected to move the museum smartly into the 21st Century.

As if he didn’t already have enough strikes against him, an advertisement for Barney’s New York, a fashionable clothier, featuring Varnedoe as a suave model in an Ermenegildo Zegna suit, appeared in the New York Times Magazine the very week that his appointment was announced. Although modeling fees for the ad series featuring “real New Yorkers” went to charity, Varnedoe’s critics accused him of being a pretty boy with media ambitions instead of a serious scholar.

“After 20 years of Bill Rubin, who was an unassailable titan for all the people who didn’t like him,” said Varnedoe, referring to his predecessor, William S. Rubin, “this was my first show and it was open season. It was time for a blood bath and time for initiation.”

The exhibition met a more appreciative audience in Chicago, and even if Southern Californians find fault with “High and Low,” they are likely to be thrilled with the congregation of first-rate artworks.

Although critics have contended that the exhibition tries either to neutralize postmodernism by pretending it is continuous with modernism or to debase modernism by pretending that recently made trash is part of high art’s logical continuum, the curators’ point was to describe “a wheel-like motion where there’s a constant interchange between the two fields,” Varnedoe said.

“It’s the continual inversion of hierarchies that the show is about. Hierarchies do exist. . . . It’s just that they can’t be defined in terms of a set of permanent rules. . . . Artists are constantly in the business of convincing us that what we thought wasn’t, is,” he said.

Tracing the roots of “High and Low,” Varnedoe said the show had a lengthy gestation. Writings on the relationship between comics and fine art by Gopnik, a former student of Varnedoe’s at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, fueled discussions between the two men when they were at the institute.

“That was one piece of the puzzle,” Varnedoe said. “Another was having worked on ‘Primitivism in 20th-Century Art’ with Bill Rubin.” That 1984 exhibition at MOMA set him to thinking about “that kind of slice through modern art’s history where you start with a premise that was crucial to what made modern art modern at the outset and is still of interest to contemporary artists today,” he said.

“It seemed to me that with all of the discussion of mass media and lots of younger artists’ interest in processed imagery, the dialogue between popular culture and high art which had been so central to Cubism at the outset was still very much alive. . . . When I looked across the landscape of 20th-Century art for other themes like ‘Primitivism’ which might have the same weight and interest, this leapt out at me.”

The curators “knew instinctively that this was a big and important subject; the question was how to make it manageable,” Varnedoe said. “We started with the notion that if this dialogue is not active in some of the most powerful, provocative, complex works of art in the 20th Century, then the show probably isn’t worth doing, so we worked from the art backwards.”

Satisfying themselves that such giants of modern art as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro and Marcel Duchamp, along with major contemporary artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, were indeed engaged in this dialogue, the curators made a list of about 25 key works that they needed for the show. Asking how they could illuminate those works led them to the categories of graffiti, caricature, comics and advertising, “any one of which could have been a story in itself,” Varnedoe said.

From that point on, they progressively narrowed the field of possibilities to present their idea clearly, he said. “There’s a whole class of art in which influence is so digested that it’s not immediately visible and another class where influence is absolutely clear and immediate but totally trivial and uninteresting. Somewhere in the middle, there’s a zone of art where the influence is important, telling, visible and demonstrable. That’s the zone that the exhibition has to operate in.”

Works by Southern California’s Finish Fetish artists are not included, for example, because “the moment of high refinement that starts in the studio and body shop and ends up in Tokyo . . . is very hard to demonstrate in an exhibition,” he said. Edward Kienholz’s interpretation of Barney’s Beanery also might seem to be a contender for “High and Low,” but that famed sculpture is more a narrative tableau about popular culture than an artwork that draws its style and manner of expression from popular genres, Varnedoe said.

Instead of trying to survey the field, the curators chose a few works each by artists they admired and deemed 20th-Century powerhouses. Once they had their cast of characters, they set up a series of “oppositions or dialogues,” contrasting, say, German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ and Russian avant-garde artist Aleksandr Rodchenko’s use of typography. Lichtenstein’s use of Girls’ Romances and All-American Men of War comics’ idealized stereotypes plays off Philip Guston’s fascination with the gritty, satirical realism of Mad magazine.

In the contemporary section of the show, Elizabeth Murray’s “absorption of comic language deep into a subject which is essentially domestic, painterly and intimate” is the vivid opposite of Jeff Koons, who “makes obvious reference to hard, brittle consumerism” in a gleaming, stainless steel bunny and a display of vacuum cleaners, Varnedoe noted.

The curators asked fundamental questions about influences on individual artworks instead of treating the subject on the usual “stratospheric level of theory and global overviews,” Varnedoe said. “The point is not just that Picasso picked newspapers or mass media, (but) it’s that he had a lot of choices available and he took a particular thing and did a particular thing to it.”

Varnedoe characterized the curatorial process for “High and Low” as “a constant set of sacrifices, winnowings and focusings which isolated what we wanted to do.” When they got down to cases, he and Gopnik discovered that many artists who have borrowed from popular sources have gone for the unfashionable end. Picasso chose funky, old-fashioned newspaper ads and typography, for example, whereas Warhol gravitated to the back pages of the National Enquirer.

The storm that greeted “High and Low” has dissipated, and Varnedoe has long since moved on to other projects. He is writing a series of talks, which will be presented next year as the prestigious Slade Lectures at Oxford University, and the Museum of Modern Art will present retrospectives of Cy Twombly, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro in coming years. “Head-On/The Modern Portrait,” an exhibition of portraits chosen by artist Chuck Close from MOMA’s collection for Varnedoe’s “Artist’s Choice” series, will open on Tuesday at the Lannan Foundation.

But Varnedoe’s biggest challenge is dealing with the sheer weight of MOMA’s permanent collection and the museum’s position in the art world. Fundamental to that challenge is the museum’s uneasy balance of modern and contemporary art.

“When the museum opened in 1929, the premise was that this is a museum of roughly the last 50 years. . . . As time moved on, the museum had to decide whether it should always only have 50 years’ worth of art in it or whether the premise meant that, 50 years before 1929, something happened in art and that the museum was tracking that,” he said.

As history evolved, the museum took the latter approach, building a collection from about 1880 forward. Carrying that premise into the present is based on a conviction that “something profoundly important happened in visual culture around the turn of the century and that we have not passed a similar watershed since,” Varnedoe said.

“Those who favor a postmodernist split would say that’s not true; in fact there has been a watershed, and they would probably pick their date somewhere in the mid-’60s. I just disagree with that. I think that the ongoing importance of people like Duchamp, for example, is further proof that early modern art was so generative of, not recipes or formulas, but of paradoxes and questions and debates that it’s still the operative set of paradigms. If that’s true, then the museum is obliged very much to be engaged with contemporary art,” he said.

Varnedoe said that while the museum has no business presenting the kinds of exhibitions that appear in galleries, it can and should place contemporary art in a historical context and organize group shows that make art intelligible for an audience that doesn’t go to SoHo.

A frequent gallery and studio visitor and the husband of environmental sculptor Elyn Zimmerman, Varnedoe displays a keen interest in contemporary art. “I still find individual artists and particular artworks that challenge me, that make me uncomfortable, that upset my categories, that cause me to want to expand my realm of understanding of human nature and experience, and that’s what I look to art for,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean I love the art world particularly or that I’m optimistic about the larger institutions, the galleries or promotion or anything else. I accept those. I think the world’s a complex place, and often very profound, interesting and good things come out of strange, corrupt reasons. Cosimo de Medici was probably not someone I would have liked a lot, and his motives were not the purest, but what came out of his patronage is astonishing.”