Handful of Fire

Like any show of its kind, the annual exhibition of contemporary U.S. art that opened in Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week bulged with duds. Artists not invited to exhibit would consider the show too small, but for gallerygoers it was far too big. Of the 161 painters represented, only a handful had fire.

Most of the pictures on the walls looked like more or less distorted reflections of each other. Jackson Pollock's nonobjective snarl of tar and confetti, entitled No. 14, was matched by Willem DeKooning's equally fashionable and equally blank tangle of tar and snow called Attic. If their sort of painting represented the most vital force in contemporary U.S. art, as some critics had contended, art was in a bad way.

Yet the abstract wing of the show included some startlingly original pictures. Morris Kantor's Lonely Bird knit the shapes of buildings and trees together with looping lines and high-keyed colors, that were all his own. In Lee Catch's dark little Fruit Boat, with its cold blaze of lights seen across the water, abstraction and representation were happily merged. Catch's painting was one of the simplest and smallest on display, but it had size.

Readily recognizable art played second fiddle at the Whitney, except for a couple of standout pictures. Jack Levine's Act of Legislature--a dull-looking chap in a toga stabbing a half-naked girl--was a vivid, if highly unpleasant, mixture of lust and righteous rage. At the Sea a Girl was a pompously titled new departure for Henry Koerner, one of the country's most promising young painters. With even more ambiguous symbolism than that which characterized his last exhibition (TIME, Feb. 21), Koerner had painted a girl hauled from the ocean while an uncurious crowd fished from the dock above. Koerner's oil was as stark as a tabloid photo, and more disturbing. Was the Girl a successful channel swimmer, or an unsuccessful suicide? The painting offered no clue.

As the show opened, the Whitney announced it would soon jettison its fine collection of 19th Century art (worth perhaps $250,000), use the proceeds to buy more & more paintings like those in the current show. For the price of such a proven masterpiece as Thomas Eakins' The Biglen Brothers Ready to Start the Race, the Whitney could probably pick up the latest Koerner, and the latest Kantor, Gatch and Levine, too.

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