Cold Disciples

Could Paris produce a new generation of painters comparable to its aging masters? Matisse, Bonnard and Rouault were all crowding 80, Picasso and Braque were close to 70. Utrillo, Vlaminck and Derain were old too, and out of the swim as well. Surrealism was all but dead. As of last week, only one "group" of painters in Paris had any recognizable form. They were "the twelve."* Nine of the twelve have already had shows this season.

Like most of the group, Gustave Singier is a married man, spends his days painting in an ice-cold studio wearing two sweaters, two coats, a muffler and hat. He seldom sees his fellow painters. Asked what the twelve call themselves, he explained that movements don't give themselves names: like Quakers, they get names pinned on them by their detractors. He--if no one else--liked, a name he had found in reading Delacroix's Journal: "Surnaturalists."

The twelve had almost everything in common except a name; they all worshiped Picasso's flat abstractions and muscular distortions of reality, and the clear, hot & cold colors of Matisse. Tracked down to their neat, freezing studios, they proved to share something more--a surprising lack of Left Bank bohemianism, and a fervor in the cause of modern art. Their fervor was that of disciples; Parisians, assessing their evident talent, anxiously waited for them to strike out on their own before handing over the keys of the city to them.

Among the youngest (the oldest is 48), 33-year-old Andre Fougeron is a dark, wiry ex-infantryman who escaped from a

German P.W. camp to help print the underground paper Lettres Franc,aises in a Montmartre cellar. He is the first nonacademic artist ever to win the coveted Prix National de Peinture, and also one of the most articulate members of the twelve. Says he:

"We all started from the four cardinal points, which are Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Bonnard. They were the armored spearhead that broke through the enemy defenses. We have been the fighting infantry which poured through the gap they opened; we widened the breach and eventually we will rout the enemy. We may not be the creators they were--time alone will decide that. But we did achieve one thing: we have changed . . . that mass of more or less enlightened public for whom those four masters were undecipherable phenomena. It is a fact that now people make an effort to see without their former conventional blinkers. It is a fact too that [although] many academic 'realistic' painters dare to appear in their naked photographic vulgarity, they now make a timid try at what are for them daring color schemes. We may claim to have done the mopping up."

For all their brave words and eager hands, the twelve had a lot of "mopping up" to do. Paris still had intractable citizens who liked to look at more recognizable pictures. After 5 1/2 years in Manhattan, Painter Marcel Vertes had just returned to Paris to open a show of the pastel, boyish maidens who have long decorated the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and sold Schiaparelli perfume in the U.S. A dozen gendarmes were needed to keep order at Vertes' opening, and all 50 of his agelessly sweet and sexy pictures sold out in a few hours.

* The twelve: Jean Le Moal, Alfred Manessier, Gustave Singier, Andre Fougeron, Edouard Pignon, Leon Gischia, Francis Tailleux, Pierre Tal Coat, Gabriel Robin, Jean Bazaine, Maurice Esteve, Charles Lapique.

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