Art: Architectural Painting

About all the painting most strictly modern architects want in their buildings can be done by a house painter. This fact greatly grieves the young school of muralists who have found their inspiration in Rivera and Orozco, their opportunity under WPA. Lately, however, a few architects and a few painters have had a happy, conciliatory thought. If modern architecture relies on the beauty of abstract forms, why should it not employ, for certain chaste effects, the painting of pure abstractionists?

Two years ago, when the Public Works Administration began to build its biggest, most expensive ($13.500,000), most admirably planned housing project, in the Williamsburg District of Brooklyn (TIME, April 18), Consulting Architect William Lescaze and Burgoyne Diller, head of the Federal Art Project’s New York City mural division, decided to try abstract murals in the project’s ten recreation rooms, each entrusted to a single artist. By last week, murals were installed in two rooms. Last week, blue-eyed Mr. Diller, harassed but proud, was finally sure enough of WPA’s abstract murals to exhibit some of them with other “Murals for the Community” in the Federal Art Gallery in Manhattan.

Many visitors to the exhibition liked best a number of ice-cold, clear abstractions of streets and buildings by 37-year-old Francis Criss, rejected for Williamsburg because out of key with allotted color schemes. Approved were smooth murals by:

¶ Balcomb Greene, 34, onetime instructor in art at Dartmouth, now respected as one of the few U. S. abstractionists capable of inventive, exhilarating design.

¶ Ilya Bolotowsky, 30, Russian-born artist skilled in the blob, or kidney, type of abstraction.

¶ Paul Kelpe, 35, German-born adept at solidly built, rectangular abstractions.