Two Exhibitions

In the apprehension of beauty, there are two apparently conflicting impulses : The first is recognition, as of a face suddenly rekindled in the memory, that makes the mind welcome her strangest comings as foreseen returns; the second is wonder, which sets men to question their own delight and to scrutinize that fabled face as a thing holy and remote. These tendencies follow no order of precedence. Now one, now the other, according to the temper of the times, prevails upon thought. The Italian artists before Giotto, borrowing the immaculate but dispassionate wonder of the Greeks, painted women whose faces were abstract as algebraic ellipses; later, yielding to a subtle warmth, their rapt, expressionless madonnas began softly to smile.

Last week, in Manhattan, two exhibitions opened which reveal the forms that these two impulses, still in flux, have taken in contemporary Art: One by Lorsen Feitelson and his wife, Nathalie Newking, at the Daniels Gallery; another by ten famed Frenchmen, at the Dudensing Galleries.

Feitelson-Newking. These two artists played marbles together, went to Art School together, married, left the U. S. for Paris, there joined a group which has turned from Cubism, Imagism, Analysm, back to the vibrant humanity of the Renaissance. In the Autumn Salon in Paris, this group routed their loud rivals. Much was murmured about latter-day Renaissance. Encouraged, Feitelson, Newking, brought to the U. S. their pictures, which cleverly reproduce an old and gracious tradition.

The Golden Sky (Feitelson) shows the influence of Giotto. Nude figures dream in a coppice, while the sun, drowning in the gulfs of the West, floods them with moted yellow light, tarnishing the trees with gold, melting to rose the ivory of their bodies.

Leda (Newking),a lady who has been painted by Paul Veronese, Correggio and Michael Angelo, bends in heroic contemplation of a swan as sturdy as a duck.

Because these painters have grown up under identical influences, and, indeed, influenced each other, the differences in their work are psychological rather than artistic. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would have studied with cries of joy their respective pictures entitled The Bathers. Feitelson's nudes repose in a rhythm of dissolving, eager curves; his wife's are passive, virginal--cold images of desire pillared in water.

Ten Frenchmen (Bonnard, Braque, Duffy, Seganzac, Laurencin, Marchand, Marquet, Matisse, Utrillo, Vlaminck) are all seduced by wonder, preoccupied with the intricacies of moods, of surfaces. The pinguid fingers of Matisse's Jenne Fille au Piano strike from the keyboard notes that drip with colored stridence, red like the shuddering walls, waxen yellow and scarlet like the overripe fruits on the table. Duffy's Trouville clutches the beach insecurely, as if at any moment it might balloon, mad with gaiety, into the seawind, and shatter its striped pavilions on the salvoing clouds. Bonnard's Le Palmier is a jungle as gemmed and blazing as the subconscious mind of a hashish eater.

Significance. Of these two exhibitions, the latter is the abler. But there is a note of weariness in the work of the Ten Frenchmen, as if they were tired of marveling at the animated apprehensions of their own suave minds. Observers, noting this fatigue, remembering also the descent of the Classicist group upon the Fall Salon, weighed more reflectively the work of Feitelson, of Newking. Just such was the state of things when a thousand Holy Ladies, in the candle-flowered dusk of Latin cathedrals, suddenly smiled.