Manhattan: Art’s Avid New Capital

NOTHING, it seems, can stop the slow westward drift of Western art. Its center has passed inexorably, though with innumerable minor eddies, from Athens to Rome to Paris. Now it is shifting westward once again, to Manhattan.

Externally, Manhattan is still far from deserving its new dignity. Its lofty skyline, magically beautiful from a distance, is made up mostly of architectural eyesores. The city’s die-straight thoroughfares have unparalleled sweep and grandeur, but—save for Central Park—they lack sufficient stopping places for eye and feet, the attractive squares found everywhere in Paris. Finally, Manhattan can boast no artist thought great around the world (in all the U.S. there is only one of such stature: midwestern Architect Frank Lloyd Wright).

Fever and Imagination

But these arguments against Manhattan’s pre-eminence as an art center mean little. The world’s most admired contemporary artists are all old and mostly French. Before World War I, the geniuses of the “School of Paris”—Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Rouault—mainly admired each other. Paris liked them not.

If a “New York School” is now in the making, as partisans claim, it grows in an artistic climate similar to that of Paris in the 1900s. As Paris was then, Manhattan is host to thousands upon thousands of young artists from near and far, fired with enthusiasm for themselves and for each other. Many scorn the art schools, and find their instruction and inspiration in a vast weekly banquet of important and exciting art shows. Their feverish eclecticism, their penchant for picking at random among the established schools and philosophies, lends the whole a chaotic effect. But the fact remains that good art seen in such quantity and variety stretches the imaginations, and therefore the possibilities, of men.

Blue Chips and Strong Futures

The art museums of the metropolitan area boast over 3,500,000 visitors a year —more than the combined yearly attendance at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. Many thousands more visit Manhattan’s 150 art galleries, where Superman, if so inclined, might see 1,500 exhibitions in a single season. The city’s galleries and art auction houses did a total business last year as great as that of any other capital. And, say gallery men, business will be even bigger this year.

Granting that snobbery can play a large part in art collecting, the Manhattan market, caters increasingly to middle-income buyers who collect little-known artists for sheer, not sneer, enjoyment. Since a layman’s taste is apt to be better than he imagines, such independent collectors may find themselves possessing the blue-chip pictures of a future market. The blue chips of the School of Paris have now climbed sky-high in price, may or may not go higher. Last month Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art paid $20,500 for a Soutine landscape that sold at only $2,500 nine years ago.

But unlike the habitués of Wall Street, those of 57th Street (and of the East 60s and “70s, to which many galleries have recently migrated) are usually just looking. With a good visual memory and a will for the work, any looker can build a splendid art museum in his own mind—where feet never tire and the lighting is good. Among New York’s candidates for such imaginary museums this week were the works shown on these pages. Their quality (and lack of it), as well as their extraordinary range, were typical of the New York art world at midseason.

Mystic & Plastic

William Blake’s sketch of a thief in the toils of a serpent was included in a collection of old masters’ drawings at the Durlacher Gallery. It shows the British mystic at his most frightening. Blake learned Italian in old age simply to read Dante, illustrated The Divine Comedy both to complement and criticize Dante’s philosophy. For Blake, hell was on earth, not in the afterworld, but still he found it real enough. In Blake’s drawing of Brunelleschi, the attacking serpent is not so much an infernal punishment for Brunelleschi’s thieveries as a symbol of the envy that made him a thief. The lightly sketched figure is lead-heavy with hatred, and seems sagging into serpentnature.

The Draped Reclining Figure by a contemporary Briton, Henry Moore, was part of a Moore show at the Curt Valentin Gallery. Moore, as renowned in his own lifetime as Blake was scorned in his, received the usual all-out praise from Manhattan critics. The New York Times’s Howard Devree went so far as to write that “the figures stand or sit or lie like members of some ancient race of prototypes of man, self-contained and with vision that goes out over larger areas of experience than those of mortals, and with a kind of wintry” courage that is not mere passive resignation. Moore’s rhythms are those of earth itself.” Noninitiates might retort that Moore’s sculptures look more subhuman than superhuman. Granting its plastic power—its dramatic impact as a shape—his Draped Reclining Figure sadly lacks the sympathy with which Blake portrayed all human beings. It is like a lump trying to shake off a nightmare, and perhaps rise to human nature.

Two Kinds of Cold

Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square: “Ascending,” at the brand-new Whitney Museum on 54th Street, looks almost identical in composition with the squares Albers has been painting for some time. A brilliant teacher (and chairman of Yale University’s Department of Design), Albers considers all his own work experimental. By painting squares within squares of varying colors, he achieves an endless variety of odd, beautiful and sometimes disturbing effects. “I push my colors,” he explains soberly. “I want to push a green so it looks red.” When students complain that to “push” colors Albers limits himself to the coldly unemotional, the artist replies with a thin smile that “emotions are usually prejudices.”

Things were very different when Frederic Remington attended Yale’s art school (1878-80). Art’s job as he learned it was to paint scenes naturalistically. A born illustrator, he roamed the vanishing West and before his early death in 1909, he did as much as any man to immortalize the Frontier. Hauling in the Gill Net captures the cold of work on windswept water; it was included in the memorial Remington show at Knoedler Galleries last week.

The Wild Ones

The Western “idea of beauty,” Paris’ Jean Dubuffet has proclaimed, is “a meager and not very ingenious invention.” An ex-wine merchant, Dubuffet decided to help out by inventing what he calls art brut. But Dubuffet’s works are more brutal than brut and have more the flavor of wet dirt than of dry wine. His Personage on a Red Ground graced a Dubuffet show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery this week. Other items: putrescent-looking half-length figures, pygmies roaming mud flats, luminescent cows. As usual with Dubuffet, the sloppy loudness of the whole exhibition was sure to reduce his fans to awed whispers and the rest to stunned silence. It hurts to laugh at Dubuffet, for he laughs first, defiantly.

George McNeil’s Circumnavigation was part of a one-man show at the Egan Gallery. An abstract expressionist in the tradition of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, McNeil limits himself as violently as any. There is no subject matter in his pictures, only gobs of paint. It is as hard to criticize such labors as it is to laugh at Dubuffet’s, for they offer no clue to their own meaning or purpose. Perhaps that is why critics generally have treated abstract expressionism with cautious respect. But last week New York Times Critic Stuart Preston reviewed the McNeil show in a manner that may mark the turning of the tide of caution: “Color [in George McNeil’s paintings] is strong and imposing and through its light and dark areas squirm ropy shapes bursting their way in and out of heavy layers of pigment here and there clotted into mounds . . . This exploitation of texture for its own sake is something that characterizes a great deal of painting by the contemporary school of New York. It strikes me not so much a sign of strength as an admission of weakness, that shape and color alone are insufficient.”

Light & Dark

Stephen Etnier, whose Black Bell hung in an Etnier exhibition at the Milch Galleries, obviously agrees that “shape and color alone are insufficient.” But instead of trying to make up the difference by tortured textures, he does it with pleasant and recognizable scenes of the sort seen on vacations. His oil technique is in fact milk-thin; daylight carries what drama his pictures have. Born 51 years ago in Pennsylvania, Etnier has long based himself in a Maine fishing village and traveled frequently. The light of unsullied skies and the distance of sea horizons do much to compensate for the calculating coolness of Etnier’s art. The way Black Bell (a buoy beached for repairs) looms toward the eye yet keeps its place in the picture is an example of his exacting craftsmanship.

The Brooklyn Museum, about half an hour from Manhattan by subway, was showing 200-odd “Masterpieces of African Art.” Drawn from collections as far away as Basel, the exhibition was among the most comprehensive ever displayed. It was a delight of the sort that may result in later nightmares, however. Africa’s master carvers were “masters” not in the Western but in a witch-doctor sense. Their purpose, mainly, was to carve objects for spirits to inhabit. Such artists never described, never analyzed, but only evoked. The spirits which African superstition demanded and African art evoked may be lonely as well as incomprehensible in Brooklyn, but they still weave powerful spells. It takes a dedicated collector to murmur, as one of the Brooklyn show’s donors did last week: “These carvings are my friends.” Brooklyn’s Maternity Figure from the Congo can make a bronze by Henry Moore look limp—and comparatively friendly.

Every week in midseason, New York sees some 40 new art exhibitions. As the eight works shown on these pages demonstrate, they are likely to represent diametrically opposed views of life and also of art itself. Amidst such diversity, new and broader concepts of art may well form, and when that happens Manhattan will become an art center as creative as it is already avid.