Art: HOME FOR MODERNS

MUSEUM directors are ‘haunted by the unhappy examples set by many of their elders, who, if they had had sagacity, could have bought a fortune in paintings hot off the easels of their contemporaries. Mid-20th century U.S. painting offers just such a challenge. Will posterity view the volcanic eruption of abstract art as one of the U.S.’s most dynamic periods? Museums all over the country are now hedging their bets by cautiously buying contemporary abstractions. One museum that has decided to buy as if there were no doubt is Buffalo’s 52-year-old Albright Art Gallery.

A procession of top museum men put the Albright on its modern course. In 1939 Director Gordon Washburn, now head of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, inaugurated a “Room of Contemporary Art,” where moderns were hung experimentally, then either acquired permanently or resold. This system, widely copied by other museums, was carried on by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, now head of Yale University Art Gallery, and current Albright Director Gordon M. Smith, 51, who switched the emphasis to U.S. abstract expressionists. The result of the Albright’s venturesome buying is a modern collection that ranks in quality right behind such mammoth institutions as Manhattan’s Modern Art, Whitney, and Metropolitan museums.

Pick of the Quick. Angel of the Albright is a peppery Buffalo booster, Woolworth Heir and Banker Seymour H. Knox, who, back in the 1930s, captained his home-town East Aurora polo team in international matches. Putting up $100,000 in 1939 to launch the Contemporary Room, “Shorty” Knox, who had previously boasted little more than one lone Utrillo, was soon head over heels in love with modern art. In the last eleven years, Yaleman (’20) Knox has donated 75 paintings and sculptures, of which more than half are products of the current decade.

Buying together and separately, Patron Knox and Director Smith have preferred the-quick to the dead, have made some startling acquisitions. Examples: ¶ Composition in White (opposite), by Jean-Paul Riopelle, 34, one of Canada’s two leading abstract painters. In Paris, where Riopelle now works, his larger canvases bring as high as $6,000. Working in intense bursts of creative activity (22 paintings last month) and laying on paint with meticulous palette-knife strokes, Riopelle is a moody painter. His Composition in White grew out of a trip to Austria. “The snowcapped Austrian mountains reminded me of Canada,” he explains. “For weeks I was obsessed by snow and winter. I finally painted this to get the obsession out of my system. I always try to depict nature as I see it.” ¶ Dynasty (opposite), by Kenzo Okada, one of Japan’s leading moderns, who now lives in Manhattan. Okada, who came to the U.S. in 1950 with a full-fledged Tokyo reputation, feels his work has become liberated in the U.S., now sells out his shows at $3,500 tops. Dynasty harkens back to Okada’s past, recalling to him “the oldtime Japan,” though the shapes are his own invention. Says he: “I find myself in nature and nature in myself. There are old pine trees in the picture (center). The blue and brown areas (upper left) are like a rainbow, a cloud, rain or fog—any symbol you pick—but with a feeling of sky, air and space.” ¶ Red and Black, by Clyfford Still. This is the Albright’s prime acquisition to date, because merely to own a Still is a rarity. Painter Still is so cantankerous that he flatly refuses to sell his work to any collector or museum not of his own choosing, and then is likely to offer only one painting at a take-it-or-leave-it price. The only other museums to own Still’s work are the San Francisco Museum of Art, which gave him his first one-man show in 1943, and Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, which had to wait two years after it devoted a whole room to Still in 1952. Says Still, “I’m not at war with anyone, but I feel a responsibility. A painting in the wrong hands is a highly dangerous force, just like a mathematical equation.”

Speaking of What? An unreconstructed individualist, Still was born in Grandin, N. Dak. in 1904, grew up on a farm, got an M.A. from the State College of Washington, where he taught art for eight years. As a teacher in the California School of Fine Arts (1946-50), he was responsible, along with Mark Rothko, for developing a generation of painters now making their marks in Manhattan, Paris, Rome. Of his own development, he says: “Each man has to find his own way. Painting forces ideas. A man has to struggle to stand, to go beyond all the extraneous material in him which is just material for a psychiatrist’s filing cabinet. I fought my own way out of this ocean to what is my own expression. But what the people want is not a bull in a field, but a Howard Johnson hamburger.”

Although he calls many of his contemporaries who show their works “the frustrated Bob Hopes of 57th Street,” Still rates high in abstract artists’ circles. Art Critic Clement Greenberg calls him “the most original painter alive”; Manhattan’s Modern Museum places him among the top four U.S. abstractionists.

To buy one of Still’s works, Albright Director Smith made a direct approach, found Still in his third-floor walk-up Manhattan studio. With 40 canvases on hand, Still placed only four against the wall. Topmost was the 9-ft.-5½-in. by 13-ft. Red and Black, in Still-like hot red. velvety black and stalactites of white. Director Smith bought it on the spot (estimated price: $5,000 to $7,000). Still says he picked it for the Albright because “it speaks with vigor.” As to what it speaks, whether of the West’s towering spaces and lost canyons or of city spaces, with looming, black skyscrapers, Painter Still does not say.