Villagers in Manhattan

Manhattan's galleries were off to a flying 1953 start with some 30 new shows open last week. Gallerygoers could choose to see almost anything from mild Bermuda landscapes to bleak views of the Arctic or carvings from the Congo. But the standout exhibition was home-town work: 119 paintings by two Greenwich Village women who rank among the top U.S. artists. Both are considered abstractionists, but the term covers a lot of ground and their paintings are as different as cumulus and calculus. The two:

LOREN MACIVER, 43, who started painting her personal world with a child's vivid imagination at three and is still going strong A shy, blue-jeaned figure who roams Manhattan in winter and enjoys the seacoast in summer, she paints sand dunes, dilapidated beach shacks, blistered city sidewalks and budding trees. Most of the time her subjects become misty almost phosphorescent fantasies. Sometimes sne turns sharply realistic and does a meticulous study of a battered window shade or a pair of old shoes. One of her best: Emmett Kelly, a sympathetic portrait of the sadeyed circus clown.

I. (for Irene) RICE PEREIRA, 45, is a handsome, green-eyed woman who dresses more like a Paris model than the paint-spattered artist she is. Moreover, she can turn from painting to writing esoteric poetry, or to giving a public lecture on abstract art, without batting an eye. When all goes well, Pereira sings as she paints; when things go badly, she cries and rages, complains of a sense of paralysis in her painting arm. But her pictures have no moods. They are as studied and frigidly precise as geometrical progressions: brilliant, carefully plotted blocks lines and dashes done in endless variation with a few primary hues. Pereira's mam effort since the war: painting simple patterns on layers of fluted and rippled glass, then placing these one on top of the other so that the refracted light jabs through as a dazzling, and sometimes eye-straining, spectrum.

The New York Times gave both show and artists a hearty cheer, spoke warmly of Pereira's "radical innovations." of MacIver as "a poet whispering of simple and humble realities." Moreover added the Times, "they are still young . . and it is quite possible that their best and most significant work lies ahead of them " Next stop for the show, after two months in Manhattan: museums in Des Moines, San Francisco and Dallas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.