While people across the United States are gearing up to celebrate the Fourth of July this weekend, London supercollector Charles Saatchi is honoring American independence in his own way--with a show highlighting the country's tradition of abstract art as practiced by some of its most ballyhooed up-and-coming talents. The exhibition, called "Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture," is a survey of 41 artists, mostly under 40, who purport to follow in the footsteps of their great countrymen like de Kooning and Franz Kline. The problem is, it's hard to move beyond the word ‘abstract’ in the title.

It is such an art-historically loaded term, with associations to the Abstract Expressionist movement of the post-World War II period, that, looking at the pieces selected for this show, I couldn’t help but think the comparison was too much of a stretch. I'm unconvinced that these painters are the artistic grandchildren of their Abstract Expressionist forefathers. Neither are the works entirely abstract--with the closest being those of Gedi Sibony, Dan Walsh, or Bart Exposito--but the majority are clearly, obviously figurative or referential. As a refresher, I looked up the definition of ‘Abstract Art’ online, and, yes indeed, form, color, and line are used in the works in this exhibition to create compositions and, yes, there is a degree of independence from visual references in the world... but not much.

Elizabeth Neel’s large-scale paintings make fragmented references to dogs in profiled outlines, over-washed with watery, dirty pastels. The blurb in the catalogue informs that the artist--the granddaughter of revered painter Alice Neel--takes dogs and their ‘dirty deeds as a departure point into a critique of abstract painting.’ Hm. Well, that’s certainly novel but I’d call that referential, not abstract. Matt Johnson’s take on Claes Oldenburg's fat, soft sculptures in his anorexic The Pianist (2005) is an easily discernible figure of a man playing a piano. Not evidently abstract.

I chose to interpret the show not by reading the catalogue, which frankly gives too much information and obscures the work, but rather by redefining the term "abstraction" to mean art that has been abstracted from, or based on, clear contemporary and historical sources. These works do draw directly from the America that surrounds the artists, whether it be the paraphernalia of a bedroom (Paul Lee’s socks, cans and light bulbs in his 2007 Untitled (Can Sculpture)), effluvia from the television and the internet, or personal obsessions, like Kristin Baker’s motor racing-inspired pseudo-Futurist collages.

Putting together an exhibition is not simply a matter of thumb-tacking a snappy, loaded title onto a bunch of stylistically diverse artworks and hoping that somehow, between the catalogue and the signage, it’ll be accepted as such. How is this show different from Saatchi’s 2006 new American art exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2006, "USA Today"? To me it seems little more than a matter of semantics and marketing. Of particular note, nonetheless, are Jacob Hashimoto’s layered circular kite collage and Jedediah Caesar’s Dry Stock (2007), resin wall panels containing lemon peels, foam, and other trash that give color and texture to the work, amounting to a result that is strangely Calder-esque.

Further Reading:

Jackie Wullschlager's scorching review in the Financial Times

Adrian Searle's slightly more generous review in the Guardian

Waldemar Januszczak's fascinating, devastating review in the Times of London

Ossian Ward's take-down in Time Out London