Pictures of the Soul

Picasso once brushed aside a criticism that his portrait of Gertrude Stein did not look like her by saying simply: "It will." In Manhattan, Vienna-trained Painter Rudolf Ray, 63, is trying to go Picasso one better. His aim: to arrive at the final "soulscape," the abstract essence of the sitter, by painting a series of eight portraits--one on top of the other. To the uninitiated the soulscapes may look like nothing more than shards of colored glass or a heavy calligraphic scrawl. But to Ray's followers, who include Hindu gurus, Taoist philosophers and Jung disciples, the paintings are readily identifiable as portraits of James Joyce and Ray's French gardener, Monsieur Pierre Aubert.

Without Their Masks. Painter Ray decided that he was equipped with an inner eye early in his career in Vienna, where he made his reputation by painting his , subjects "without their masks." His highly expressionistic portraits won him the praise of famed Vienna Painter Oskar Kokoschka and the plaudits of Vienna art critics.

Deciding that "psychology is not everything," Ray moved to Paris, was cheerfully painting a still life of flowers the day Hitler arrived. Ray managed to escape on a freighter, along with Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp, arrived in Manhattan in 1942. Soon after, Ray found his paintings turning into abstractions, called on Duchamp for advice. The result: Duchamp arranged a show for Ray at Peggy Guggenheim's avant-garde gallery. Since then, Ray has lingered longer and longer over each canvas; his finished pictures with all layers dried out often weigh 300 lbs.

The Unconscious Self. Last year Ray started work on a portrait of Columbia Lecturer Daisetz Suzuki, 79, a bushy-browed Zen Buddhist philosopher. Rather than paint the portraits on top of each other, Ray decided to make eight consecutive portraits. The result, on view this week in Manhattan's Willard Gallery, added up to a tour de force for the initiated. But the others were floundering after they left Stage One: a generally recognizable oil sketch of Suzuki.

In Ray's series Suzuki next turned into an angry black scrawl, faded into heavy yellow and black (Soul Fading), then dramatically changed into a thick impasto of blues, orange, black, with lines scratched out by Ray's palette knife. Believing that "the artist, like physicists, must use the abstract to get to the concrete," Ray's next two portraits of Suzuki were abstractions of opposing lines. No. 7 stopped most viewers in their tracks. It was a startling blank canvas, washed in with cloudy browns. But Taoist Lecturer Dr. C. Y. Chang, on hand for the opening, recognized it immediately as "TAO, the Unconscious Self."

The final portrait was a handsome, delicately painted oil that looked like a faded Buddhist scroll suggesting blue mountains, red sky and willow-green foreground. At this point, according to Ray,

Suzuki and Zen Buddhism became one. Philosopher Suzuki, on hand to see his portrait for the first time, was not so sure. Said he: "I know nothing of these things. Therefore, I cannot say." Prompted by Painter Ray ("You have said that when you say you don't know, then you know"), Philosopher Suzuki bowed with a smile, politely admitted: "That too can be true."

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