Art: Ideas & Illuminations

Almost any original art invites and gets plenty of parody. But a poser for parodists is that rare kind of art which, while apparently too screwy to be endured, is too subtle to be burlesqued. In this class were two noteworthy exhibitions of paintings in Manhattan last week. Both were highly admired by artists and students familiar with modern art. Each provided exhilarating exercise for eyes trained on visual commonplaces. Because nine out of ten people want about as much exercise from painting as they want from a warm bath, neither artist was likely to become popular with the man-in-the-street. But it was extremely improbable that either would come in soon for such horseplay as Buffalo enjoyed last week with surrealism (see p. 40).

Perambulator. Paul Klee has not been without honor in Europe or the U. S, At the world-famed Bauhaus directed by Architect Walter Gropius at Weimar, later Dessau, Germany, Klee was for nine years one of three artist-instructors in painting.*Like Picasso and de Chirico, he was tapped by the surrealists in the ’20’s but stayed outside the club. In 1930 Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art gave him the first big U. S. exhibition. When Germany became inclement to modern art five years ago, stern-faced, gentle Fantasist Klee settled near his birthplace in Berne, Switzerland, to paint, play Mozart with his wife, study nature. Last week’s show at Manhattan’s Buchholz Gallery was the largest, most comprehensive he has ever had in the U. S.

One of Klee’s methods of drawing has been summed up by Critic Herbert Read as “taking a walk with a line.” This is an accurate description not only of his procedure but sometimes of his scale: the expanse of paper or canvas being imagined as a field of any dimension up to, and possibly including, infinity. It is Perambulator Klee’s frequent achievement not only to imagine such a field for himself but to open it up somehow to the spectator. One water color in last week’s show, Bird, Ph Feeds Ur with the Snake, at first sight only a delicately smoky paper with a tangle of lines in the centre, suggested a cosmic twilight and the chaotic, prehistoric figures of monsters. In another kind of shorthand, a gouache called Winter Flowers showed a pattern of slim stems and frosty white blooms against grey darkness. Here all the spectator had to contribute was a simple association of darkness with winter.

Many of Artist Klee’s paintings were more eerie than these, e.g., On the Lawn (see cut) with its lemon-yellow stratified spectre children. Many of his recent works were more abstract, taking a line walking for its own sake, using hieroglyphic bands, patterns of color values, simplifications borrowed from paleolithic cave drawings or the art of children. If a few of such Klee ideas seemed oversubtle, there was no lack of ideas.

Villager. Paul Klee began as an etcher, and his color generally remains less alive than his line. The opposite was true of a remarkable collection of 20 paintings hung last week in Manhattan’s East River Gallery, the first one-man show of a 28-year-old New York artist named Loren Maclver. The best of these pictures brought yelps of pleasure from critics who have long complained that much U. S. painting shows the imaginative audacity of a dish rag. One of them. Procession of Small Beings, was close to a Klee fantasy except for its peculiarly vernal, blues and grays and its air of non-human humor. More evocative than Klee paintings, many Maclver paintings had to be looked at just as long before her nifty effects of specific atmosphere and illumination came through. Examples:

The Past Recaptured: a wood panel with cracked, dim paint counterfeiting a 14th-Century relic, on which a pink and grey form swam outward as the artist’s face.

Yellow Season: a big canvas painted in a monotone of mustard yellow with twiggy lines here and there, the shape of a pump indicated, some clothes on a line, gradually more lines taking shape as backyard impedimenta, hints of flowers, and finally a perspective of May sunshine up a hill with slashes of blue sky over it.

Shack: the four furnished walls and floor of Artist Maclver’s home-made cottage on Cape Cod, splayed out flat against a violet void and viewed from above as the driftwood rafts they are.

In this shack, slim, brown-eyed, tangle-bobbed Artist Maclver once spent a winter. But every other winter since she was 16 she has lived in one or another dusty studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Last week, in her skylit garret on MacDougal Street, wearing leather sandals and paint-splattered slacks, she welcomed more interviewers from the press than she had ever seen in her life, testified to her work at the Art Students’ League, told her love for chile concarne and the late French painter Odilon Redon, and recalled that when she sold her first two pictures two years ago through Director Alfred H. Barr Jr., of the Museum of Modern Art, she didn’t have a nickel for the subway ride up town.

*The others: Russian Vasily Kandinsky, American Lyonel Feininger.