Art: New Blood

“How many artists must fall by the wayside,” mused aging Master Henri Matisse, “for the one that comes through.” Most of the 1,000-odd artists exhibiting in Paris’ annual “Salon d’Automne” last week had indeed fallen by the wayside. But at least a half dozen had come through.

Honey & Whistles. In the mass it was a conservative show, crammed with more or less competent studies of tired nudes, slick portraits and landscape reminders of pleasant vacations. Instead of the rose-covered cottages and shady elms in similar U.S. landscapes, there were purple-shadowed chateaux and blue and green glimpses of the Cote d’Azur. Roger Chapelain-Midy (45) had contributed an end-of-holiday picture that was one of the hits of the exhibition. Entitled The Month of September, it was a subtle yet straightforward portrait—done in the rich, muted colors of honey and white grapes—of a girl sitting in a walled garden with its last fruits in her lap. Ex-Cubist François Desnoyer was represented by a solidly constructed harbor picture in colors as bright and brassy as boat whistles.

But with those exceptions, the standout pictures were not conservative works. Biggest, and in some ways best, painting in the show was a tumultuous Wild Animal Hunt by Bernard Lorjou, who, at 40, is considered a promising “young” painter in France and has never exhibited in the U.S. To some mid-20th Century eyes, Lorjou’s Hunt might look like a wild burlesque of one by Delacroix. But in the mid-19thCentury, Delacroix’ own hunt pictures had seemed like parodies of Rubens’. Lorjou’s muscular distortions and crackling, fiery colors were more emotional than artful, yet there was art in them as well.

Geometry & Assurance. For delicate tastes there were the smaller, cooler and more careful paintings of France’s top second-rankers, including Pierre Tal-Coat (44), Andre Marchand (42), Francis Tailleux (36) and Edouard Pignon (44), who unabashedly follow Picasso’s and Matisse’s lead and do it well. If their geometrized landscapes and still lifes said nothing very new, they at least spoke with assurance. Originality, they could reasonably argue, is less important than mastery.

At 44, Abstractionist Oscar Dominguez has both. His big, somber Composition owed an obvious debt to his good friend and fellow Spaniard Picasso, but its loony, mountainous melee of animals and things was Dominguez’ own, a jumble of the sort one sees at the moment of going to sleep or awakening, transformed and made monumental by the order and clarity of the painter’s arrangement. A huge, expansive man whose rolling eyes and fierce mustache make him look like the villain in a melodrama, Dominguez may well become a new hero in French art.