The 1863 edition of the Salon de Paris, the conservative, government-sanctioned biennial, would have been largely forgotten were it not for the protests. That year, the Salon jury turned away more than half of the hopeful, most of them practitioners of the new, loosely brushed technique soon to be dismissively referred to as Impressionism. Their discontentment reached Napoleon III, an expert populist, who ordered a simultaneous exhibition: le Salon des Refusés — literally, “The Exhibition of the Rejected” — among whom were Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet, whose “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” scandalized (but didn’t sell). It’s considered the first major breach of modernism.
That punk, avenging spirit animates the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition’s “Salon des Refusés 2024,” an exhibition of work spurned by the Brooklyn Museum’s recently opened “Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” at least in name. Whether the next Manet can be found in the Coalition’s sprawling Red Hook warehouse is unlikely; there is no radical pictorial advancement or rupture of accepted taste here. But counterprogramming is always useful, and taken together, the two shows, deeply uneven in their own distinct ways, reveal a small piece of the city’s usually unseen stock of strivers.
Pegged to its bicentennial, the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year issued an open call to artists living in or maintaining a studio in the borough to submit proposals. Some 4,000 responded — no doubt a daunting task for the jury of artists (Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, Fred Tomaselli and Jeffrey Gibson, all museum trustees) — to wade through, especially as one third of the show was already filled by artists invited by either the selection committee or the museum.
In its entirety, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” — 227 objects by 215 artists spread across 20,000 square feet in the museum — is itself a kind of second prize, made up of work that is not included in the museum’s more consequential rehang of its American collection. As curatorial conceits go, “pays taxes in Brooklyn” is not airtight. The show is about many things — community engagement, inclusivity, good will, warm feelings, accidents of real estate — but an aesthetic argument is not one of them. It is a disjointed, formless dip into very recent contemporary art that varies widely in discipline and makes no attempt to say anything that hasn’t been said elsewhere. There is beauty to be found, but there’s also whiplash.
