Art: Whither Away

One sure way to start an argument in artistic circles is to try to define the course of contemporary American painting. Sometimes it seems headed for new heights, sometimes for dead-end crashes. It ranges between the two extremes of realism: 1) making paint look as much as possible like something else, and 2) letting it look like just paint. It makes some people mad and others glad, on alternate days. A good example of what the shouting is about can be seen this week at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, where Director James Johnson Sweeney has assembled an exhibition of 54 paintings entitled “Younger American Painters.”

Director Sweeney, who toured the country to make his selections in person, favors abstract art, and the scattering of representational pictures in his exhibition looks almost as out of place as dogs at a flower show. But Sweeney carefully points out that the exhibition is not meant to be a cross section or to indicate a trend.

Jockstraws in the Sky. Sweeney does suggest that U.S. painters are less conscious of tradition than the European and are apt to experiment more. He finds a surprising degree of Oriental influence in American art and a lot of new life among the West Coast painters. A standout illustration of all three points is Morris Graves’s monochromatic Young Gander Ready for Flight. Seattle’s Graves goes his own experimental way (TIME, March 15, 1948), but he is obviously more indebted to Oriental art than to the European. San Francisco’s Ralph Du Casse, who also draws inspiration from the Far East, contributed one of the strongest pictures in the show: an edgy abstraction that appears to superimpose Chinese calligraphy on shattered glass. Brooklyn’s Adolph Gottlieb batted out one of the best abstractions of his career for the home team. Whether it represents jackstraws twirling in the evening sky or dumbbells flying at Jacobs Beach is not made clear by the title: W.

Any exhibition of a crowd of contemporary artists is bound to include some lemons, and a few canvases at the Guggenheim look not so much painted as beaten with muddy sticks. A contrastingly pristine nothing is Two Circles, by the art director for Conde Nast magazines, Alexander Liberman. Consisting simply of two shiny black disks on a white panel, it is as chic as two black eyes have become in cafe society.

Hats in the Air. Manhattan critics divided sharply on the show. The Herald Tribune’s Emily Genauer found it “all really very good-looking, but it’s still so uninteresting.” Art News’s twinkly old Henry McBride, who has been reviewing for more than 40 years, flung his hat in the air. The show proves, said McBride, “that this country of ours does seem to be really going along at last on its own power, with so few and such slight references to European painting that they may be discounted at the start.” Others were less quick to decide the overall value of the exhibition. Perhaps Sweeney’s selections were too personal to answer any major questions about the present and future of American art, but they raised plenty.