Art: The Lost Generation

Five jurymen last week trooped into a spacious, canopied gallery in Pittsburgh’s dingy Carnegie Institute, eased themselves into five waiting aluminum wheelchairs, then settled back for their intense, 2½-day task. All about them was the hand-picked selection of work by 328 artists from 23 countries about to be exhibited in this year’s 40th Pittsburgh International, oldest (since 1896) and most prestigious U.S. international art show.

This year one glance was enough to tip off the jurors to what was in store. Of 35 oils hanging in the central gallery, only three (including one by the late Fernand Léger) were remotely representational. The steadily mounting flood of abstract painting, instead of subsiding, has now surged across all national boundary lines and established itself as the international style of the mid-20th century. After spending the past year combing dealers’ galleries, museums and artists’ studios across the U.S., Europe and Latin America, Carnegie Institute Art Director Gordon Bailey Washburn, charged with hand-picking this year’s contestants, found only one conclusion possible: “Abstraction continues the chief idiom of the day and, if anything, is gaining ground and popularity.”

Uncharted Seas. Confronting the jury, as the members wheeled about the galleries, was an array of the styles that have turned contemporary painting into a seething, uncharted sea of rival techniques, fads and dead-end experiments. They ranged from the surface violence of U.S. Painter Willem de Kooning’s grotesque female portraits to the acrid brilliance of German painters like Fritz Winter, still haunted by Klee and Kandinsky. Paint surfaces varied all the way from Holland’s Karel Appel, who trowels on paint like a pastry cook slathering on frosting, to the latest French vogue for tachism (staining), where thin paint trickles down the canvas like spilled ink.

Surprisingly, in this welter of private imagery, a handful of steadily developing artists have managed to battle their consistent way to recognition in top international competitions. This year the Carnegie jury confirmed the growing reputation of two painters:

¶First prize ($2,000) went to France’s Alfred Manessier, 44, for his 5-ft.-wide Crown of Thorns (opposite), a radiant liturgical painting in which a molten skull, mouth agape, glows hot beneath a blue-black thorn crown. Painter Manessier, who was reconverted to Roman Catholicism after service in World War II, began to change from figurative to nonfigurative painting in 1947, also branched out into stained glass and tapestry design. With increased recognition as one of France’s foremost painters (TIME, Mar. 21) has come a good share of the world’s top art awards: the 1953 São Paulo Bienal, the 1954 Sacred Art prize at Vienna and last week’s Carnegie. Says Manessier: “I remain convinced that the quality of a work of art is measured by the sum of humanity it contains and releases.”

¶Second prize ($1,000) went to Mexico’s Rufino Tamayo, 55, who two years ago tied with Manessier for top painting honors at São Paulo. Tamayo’s prizewinning painting this year: his deep-hued, superbly painted Fruit Vendors (TIME ART COLOR PAGE, Jan. 24), in which Tamayo transformed a Mexican market scene into a fused balance of realism and evocative symbolism.

Lesser awards went to Italy’s Renato Birolli, 49, for his dramatic composition of lightning in a vineyard; to Chilean-born Painter Matta, 43, for a 10-ft.-long canvas filled with bedazzling pyrotechnics that looked like a combined château and gasworks in hell the night the fireworks factory blew up; to Rome’s Toti Scialoja, 41, for a low-keyed study in a lyrical cubist style. Not until the honorable mentions did the first U.S. painters appear: little-known Pittsburgh Artist Marjorie Eklind, 31, and this year’s leading U.S. Prizewinner John Hultberg, 33 (TIME, May 2, et seq.).

Sock in the Eye. In introducing the public to this year’s exhibition, the show’s catalogue warned: “The language of painting is not translatable. One must learn to read it directly from pictures.” But even the jury admitted that the public’s baffled bewilderment indicates that something important is missing in most of today’s art. Said former Louvre Curator René Huyghe: “Art today aims to shock. In effect the artist spits on the canvas, delivers a punch in the eye. I prefer fruit on a napkin.” Italy’s leading Abstract Painter Afro in part agreed: “There is too much concern with surface effects, an attempt to make them appear ‘modern,’ even if this means contempt for color. What is missing is a maturing process, a depth of spirituality.” For Boston Museum of Fine Arts Director Perry Rathbone, it was “a lack of faith in man and the visual world.”

To U.S. Social Realist Ben Shahn, 57, the obvious fact was that today abstract artists and their public are poles apart. Said Shahn: “The great subject of Western Art has always been the crucifixion. At times painters have focused on the landscape behind, at times on the still life in the foreground, but the great subject must be there. Unfortunately, from time to time a generation of painters has to be sacrificed while artists re-explore the potentialities of their tools. This seems to be such a generation.”

If so, the work of such artists as Manessier and Tamayo may be early beacons marking the channel into which an enriched modern art will flow. Better than most of their contemporaries they are beginning to resolve the problem the modern artist has set for himself: creating a visual image that not only squares with his inner vision, but also can be projected as a meaningful experience to his public.