Putting Ideas Together

The big news on Manhattan's art-marketing 57th Street last week was a single picture. It had taken three years of planning and three more years of painting. Peter Blume's 6-ft.-wide canvas, which he called The Rock, was a complex allegory of building and decay, done with photographic, Technicolored precision.

Like it or not--and some gallerygoers decidedly did not--the painting had authority and punch. In the fast-stepping world of modern art (which turns out an even higher percentage of grade B quickies than Hollywood) it was a supercolossal production. As with all such productions, except those of genius, it inclined to be heavyhanded.

Not So Hopeful. Stocky, sandy-haired Peter Blume is an old hand at big things--which sell for four-and five-figure sums. One of his first was South of Scranton, a surrealistically weird picture of sailors soaring through the air under a crow's nest, which took first prize at the 1934 Carnegie International and now resides in the basement of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. His next was the Museum of Modern Art's Eternal City--in which a bilious, jack-in-the-box Mussolini rules over a ruined square. "I hope," says Blume fervently, "that I won't get involved in still another big picture, but I suppose I will. I'm cursed that way. When I first began painting I was satisfied with putting shapes and colors together on canvas; now I have to put ideas together too." He still does small paintings as a relaxation from his idea-pictures.

What are the ideas in The Rock? Blume believes he has "never made a virtue of obscurity, but there's always more than one level of interpretation to a thing. For instance the rock symbol is bound to be enigmatic. Biblically it's the deity, the source. This rock started out spherical, egg-shaped. Then in the process of working it out I made a fission, a break in it. There's a lot of destruction going on all through the picture--the phosphorescence of decay--but I think the emphasis is on construction. Compositionally the figures and the smoke all spiral toward the building being done."

Not So Placid. Born in Russia, Blume was brought to the U.S. at five, grew up in Brooklyn. He went to work at 13 as a lithographer's apprentice, studied art on the side. At 18 he got an advance from a Manhattan gallery so he could paint fulltime. ("I've been able to get along by just painting ever since, though things haven't always been rosy.") Now 42, he lives with his wife in a small house in Sherman, Conn. His daily schedule is "just getting up and going to work. Nothing ever interferes with that." Mrs. Blume used to read novels aloud to him while he painted, but lately they have given it up. ("I've been less placid in the last few years.")

Does he enjoy his work? That, Blume says, is "an awkward question. By enjoyment I usually mean sensuous pleasure, and it certainly isn't that. You don't always enjoy the thing you're possessed by, but you have to do it."

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