Full Sail

Manhattan's art season was out of the doldrums and clipping along under full sail. From 57th Street to Greenwich Village last week, the galleries opened 40 new shows. Among the most interesting:

JACKSON POLLOCK, who once flirted with form in his abstract paintings, then rejected it for pure drippings from a paint can, now seems to be swinging slowly back to brush & palette art. In five of his 14 new canvases there are signs of brush work, and in four of them there is a bow to form: a writhing, half-kneeling woman, a grotesque head, a suggestion of an animal. The rest is mostly recognizable Pollock: rich blots and dribbles of free-running color.

DRAWINGS FROM Punch, a collection of 150 cartoons by 50 of the artists who give Britain's venerable funny magazine its polite kick. Punch's jesters like the same simple lines, merrily exaggerated expressions, and hapless characters as their U.S. counterparts: bumbling doctors, madcap crooks, chesty admirals and busty dowagers.

IRWIN HOFFMAN, a successful Manhattan portraitist who has been out of sight for six years studying the old masters' techniques, at last is ready to show off the results. His 26 formal portraits seem as relaxed and unposed as snapshots; his subjects are caught speaking, smiling, playing. Two of the smoothest: a winning study of a redheaded youngster totally absorbed in playing with watercolors, a musician's wife leaning attentively forward as if listening to chamber music.

JEAN AUGUSTS DOMINIQUE INGRES, a rare look at the work of a conservative 19th century (1780-1867) French master who was never fully appreciated in the U.S. during his lifetime. The Ingres Museum in his native Montauban has combed its collection of 4,000 paintings and drawings, sent over 53 of the master's finest: 16 religious scenes, landscapes and portraits, 37 delicate drawings of prancing nude dancers, a Madonna-like head, a ragged Roman beggar, a man playing cards. All show Ingres' love of classic line and precise detail. One of his mannered best: a pencil drawing, The Forestier Family, in which Ingres pays homage to young Julie Forestier, whom he was engaged to marry but later deserted. (Julie, the legend goes, put off all subsequent suitors with the statement: "When you have had the honor of being engaged to M. Ingres, you don't marry.") Next stops for the exhibit, after a month in Manhattan: Manchester, N.H., Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, San Francisco.

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