Art: Ruts & Peaks

Of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. tourists who are swarming across Europe this summer, a great number will visit Venice and ride in a gondola. A few of them will go to see Venice’s 26th biennial exhibition, one of the biggest contemporary art shows ever staged. It has been characterized as a cornucopia of riches (more than 3,000 entries from 27 nations), and as a pain in the craning neck. The riches are there, and it takes craning to find them.

Sagging Slaves. As might be expected in so vast a show, 90% of the work slavishly follows fashion. Although Russia & Co. boycotted it, the exhibition sags with samples of the “social realism” which Mussolini and Hitler favored and Stalin now finds useful: photographic renderings of put-upon people, marching masses, fighting men and conquerors-over-all. These match in dullness the acres of canvas set to the prevailing wind of abstractionism.

Among the hundreds of contemporary abstractionists showing at Venice, there are a handful of clever artists. Stuart Davis, for one, soups up the American pavilion with designs as piercing and brassy as a Louis Armstrong high note. Lording it over the British pavilion are Graham Sutherland’s pictures of what look like livid innards strung up on brambles. Derived from Picasso’s “Tomato Plant Period” of a decade ago, they are equally forceful and unpleasant.

(British Critic Sir Kenneth Clark maintains that Sutherland is not really an abstractionist, on the curious ground that he “imitates objects with the most literal reality; only these objects do not usually exist.”)

Lifting Lights. The standouts of the show are the few independent painters who highball down the middle of the road, avoiding the easy-riding ruts of sheer abstraction and mere representation. Fifty such men might have lifted the whole exhibition into brilliance; the few who are represented at Venice shine like lights in the prevailing gloom. Three of their works are reproduced opposite. Dufy’s 41 pictures, dating back to 1904, prove for the umpteenth time his vintage quality. Partly crippled by arthritis, as Renoir was, he permits nothing but ease and gaiety to show in his work, the same effect that Renoir always achieved. Hopper’s 20 contributions are comparatively dour, and less deft, but their directness and monumentality may help earn him a place in history next to the two great masters of American painting, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Max Gubler’s 42 paintings turn the Swiss pavilion into a sunlit peak, and assure the reputation of a hitherto little-known artist. “Talent and ideas,” says Gubler, “are nothing. The job is to paint what you have seen and what you feel in the only way those things can be expressed.” That timeless credo has no truck with fashion.