Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
WHO GETS TO CALL IT ART?Portrait of a curator.Running time: 80 minutes. Not rated (nothing objectionable). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue. Through Feb. 14.
THE '60s art scene in New York was wild and wacky, due in large part to the influence of one man: Henry Geldzahler.
Peter Rosen's documentary "Who Gets to Call It Art?" paints an entertaining picture of the cherubic gentleman, who as the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought new excitement to the stodgy institution.
His groundbreaking 1970 exhibition, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" - or simply "Henry's Show," as it became known - cleared 45 of the museum's galleries of 18th and 19th-century European art to make way for postwar American paintings and sculpture by upstarts like Larry Pons, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg.
The New York art world would never be the same.
Rosen's film includes new and archival interviews with artists that the flamboyant Geldzahler (1935-1997) championed.
Most fun are the home movies, photos and drawings of Geldzahler, many by Warhol. For instance, we get to see Geldzahler wearing a bathrobe and smoking a cigar while he floats in a rubber raft in a swimming pool.
Then there's a hilarious old TV commercial for Braniff Airlines featuring Warhol and Sonny Liston. The boxer says not a word while the pop artist intones: "There is a beauty in soup cans that Michelangelo could not have imagined."
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
