Art: Abstract Baptism

Manhattan’s Fine Arts building on 57th Street has been hallowed for years by the conservative exhibits of the National Academy of Design. Last week it was baptized in extremism by the first pontifical show ever held of U. S. abstract art. The showrooms were filled with 150 constructions, ranging from an arrangement of amoeba shapes, wires and an electric headlight, to round and oval salad bowls stuck on a chaste grey background. They were the work of some 50 members of the American Abstract Artists, a two-year-old and growing group which takes itself very seriously as the nucleus of a new geometric school.

Most visitors were merely tired by this exhibition. It was overcrowded, and the same sort of thing had been done before and better by the Europeans who originated it. A few temperate and tolerably fresh efforts were, nevertheless, visible. One was an Indian Concretion (see cut) by tall, silent, Socialite George L. K. Morris, whose inspiration for this pattern of rose, purple, black, green and orange forms came from objects in the Museum of the American Indian. Thoughtful critics believe that simple designs of this character hold the most promise for abstract art in the U. S. To the artist an abstraction may be either child’s play with pretty shapes or a highly organized intellectual design. To the spectator it is decoration—at best, pure and simple; at worst, impure and complex. Last week’s spectators saw a few abstractions that were pure and simple enough to be lived with.