Art: Pat Chaos

There were 20 civilian photographers at Bikini—but only one artist. Of all things, he was an abstractionist.

This week Ralston Crawford’s painted reports were reproduced in the December FORTUNE and went on view in a Manhattan gallery. The closest thing to nature in his blast pictures was an occasional circle (representing portholes) which he included for the sake of contrast “as you would show the whiteness of a wall by putting a thumbprint on it.” His Test Able was a pat, flat imitation of chaos.

To anybody vainly looking for the atom bomb’s familiar and awesome mushrooming spray, Abstractionist Crawford explained that he had painted what he felt, not what he saw. His paintings, he added, were “a comment on the negative and positive expressions of contemporary society, with an emphasis on the negative. . . . Definitely most people won’t understand. . . . They approach pictures—not only my own but all works of art—with the mistaken idea that they can understand them after looking at them briefly. Yet these same people would expect to spend several hours on a work of art like a novel.”