Shout in the Dark

In season, Manhattan averages at least one first-rate art show (as against dozens of dull ones) every week. Last week's most exciting show fell to the Kootz Gallery, which hung ten weird canvases by a controversial Frenchman named Georges Mathieu. The exhibition was almost bound to draw as many boos as bouquets, but none could deny its forcefulness.

The hit of the show, in fact, is rather like a hit on the head. The canvas, a coal-black rectangle all of 13 1/2 feet wide, is decorated with a smeary white explosion centering on what looks like a tangle of crimson worms. That is all, and the title, Homage to Philip III, "The Bold,"* was clearly not intended as an aid to understanding. The painting was no beauty in the ordinary sense of the word, and expressed no more meaning than a wordless shout in the dark.

Ferocity & Chic. What the painting did have was a vigor to match its huge size. In places it looks as vital as a plunge of lightning--or at least as the stormy "N" of Napoleon's signature. Those who find exhilaration in fast driving at night might well warm to the picture, for it creates a sense of deep black space shot through with gleams, glares, flashes and slow beams of light. The blood-red tangle at the center, brilliantly meshed with the whites, is like a single note of ferocity which saves the whole from coldness.

The ferocity is also part of Mathieu's obvious desire to overpower the viewer and compel his attention. Two smaller pictures--a snarl of black on a red canvas and a few black splashes on a white canvas--show that when the shouter lowers his voice, he also lowers his standards; they are simply chic. But as a whole the exhibition proves that Mathieu is as powerful an abstract expressionist as Manhattan's own Willem de Kooning.

Fame & Fortune. Now 33, Mathieu has already made his fame in Europe, sells everything he paints. Slim, dapper, cultivated, he occupies a town house furnished with fine Gothic furniture and Persian carpets, in the fashionable La Muette section of Paris. He whips out small paintings in as little as ten minutes, and even his huge pictures require no more than a couple of hours to paint. This, as Mathieu is frank to point out, leaves him "lots of time for other activi ties . . . I'm keenly interested in modern music, philosophy, mathematics, poetry, literature . . ."

Like most painters of his school, Mathieu is his own worst advocate. He says he has "no interest in nature," and maintains that his art is what he calls "an orgasm of uncontrolled expression." But whether he chooses to admit the fact or not, Mathieu's paintings are as elaborately controlled as a professional golfer's game. Moreover they do reflect the real world around him, especially the technologically molded world of speed, smoke, glare, and vast perspectives.

-A weak and ill-starred king who showed himself energetic only as a huntsman, Philip ruled France from 1270 to 1285.

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