Art: Natural Language?

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International is one of the three great biennial shows (with Venice’s and Sao Paulo’s) that survey and measure contemporary art from all over the world. For the 39th Carnegie, which opened last week, the museum’s new director, Gordon Washburn, chose 305 paintings from 24 nations. They make a generally lively show, but one that belies the

Carnegie’s traditional claim of being a cross section of current trends. For Director Washburn is a partisan of abstract art, and some 200 of his selections are more rather than less abstract.

Washburn asserts, somewhat defiantly, that his favorite contemporary school is “the natural language of our century . . . Any other form of artistic communication must actually be contrary to the compulsions of the age itself, whose strong currents cannot be stayed.” Swimming with the tide, the Carnegie jury gave all six prizes to more-or-less-abstract paintings.

The $2,000 top money went to Ben Nicholson for a thin, delicately colored canvas called December 5, 1949. At 58, Nicholson is the dean of British abstractionists, and whether or not his picture merits the prize, his deanship perhaps does. The son of a conservative portraitist, Nicholson usually starts with a landscape or still life, then refines it almost out of existence.

Many of the Carnegie exhibitors take the opposite approach, hastily dropping their brushes as soon as their work begins to resemble something. But in abstract art the effect’s the thing, not the method—and, as the 39th Carnegie proves, a slew of puzzling, annoying, innocuous or pleasing effects can be achieved. Eight of the best are shown on the following two pages:

¶ Germany’s Fritz Winter is as wild as Britain’s Nicholson is mild. Yet the apparent boldness of Winter’s Elevation rests on brushwork as fluent and as decisive as that of Chinese calligraphers. He is a leading figurein the expressionistic, anti-geometrical wing of abstract art.

¶ Vieira da Silva (Invisible Pedestrian) is a rising star of the geometrical school. She finds inspiration in the Moorish tiles of her nativePortugal, which combine “space, color and musical mathematics.”

¶ Jiro Yoshihara’s Japanese Sunday argues for the universality, if not the naturalness, of the abstract language: his melancholy picture looksextraordinarily like the work of Manhattan’s Willem de Kooning, whichYoshihara has never seen.

¶ Leonardo Cremonini is only 27 but a major Italian abstractionist. In his strongly sculptural Slaughterhouse, he gets his effects with bone-dry lights and luminous, wet darks that dominate but do not obscure the subject matter.

¶ The Netherlands’ Piet Ouborg, who spent 20 years in Java, apparently returned with a head full of tropical dazzle. His haphazard Driving Away is the sort of painting that drives people away from abstractionism.

¶ Jean Bazaine (Dawn), like many a school-of-Paris abstractionist, sets himself the problem of compressing such vast and various things as seas and skies into swirling canvases.

¶ Heinz Trökes of Germany owes a great debt to Switzerland’s great Paul Klee. Trokes’ Between Clouds and Crystals is gay as an awning and deft as a magician’s trick, though neither so gay nor so deft as Klee could be.

¶ Gustave Singier is a highly sophisticated Parisian whose debt to Wassily Kandinsky is obvious. Like many Kandinskys, Singier’s Homage to Ravel is made of neat snippets of color, tossing and crossing in cool space.

Kandinsky and Klee did more than anyone else to invent the language of modern art. Their followers have developed an impressive number of dialects. Although it is hard to hear the voices of today’s quieter artists above the abstractionists’ hue & cry, it seems likely that the noise will subside in time. As Carnegie Director Washburn puts it: “The 1952 International gives the impression of looking forward into the future. But it is actually of its own time, the year 1952.”