Americans in Paris

Modern American art stormed through Paris last week, the advance patrol of a U.S. culture parade that before summer is out will treat Frenchmen to everything from Oklahoma! and Medea to the New York City Ballet, the Philadelphia Symphony, and a collection of some 60 French masterpieces on loan from U.S. collections. As lead-off event, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, setting up an advance base in Paris, staged a big show of modern art, including not only paintings and sculptures, but architectural exhibits, photographs, movies, prints, posters, and barrels of modern gadgets.

There was nothing muffled about the opening gun of the "Salute to France." Nor were Parisians sure that they liked everything they saw. But that U.S. art packed a wallop, no one any longer disputed.

Lost at Sea. For the opening night, visited by 2,500 guests, a once drab ground-floor gallery of Paris' Musee National d'Art Moderne had been transformed into a gleaming room swimming in diffused light and housing what was unquestionably the hit of the show: a handsome cross section of contemporary U.S. archi-texture. Among the large scale-models and ceiling-high photomurals: Pittsburgh's aluminum-sheathed Alcoa Building, Manhattan's stilt-borne Lever House, Chicago's glass towers by Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright's laboratory for the Johnson Wax Co. in Racine, Wis. Spotlighted in a second gallery, blacked out with velvet draperies, were a host of machine-made objects from frying pans and plastic cups to oyster forks. Surveying this invasion of an art gallery by kitchen utensils, one indignant dowager demanded: "Man Dieu, is this a trade fair or an art show?"

For Frenchmen expecting to touch familiar ground with the "real art," the 108 paintings and 22 sculptures by 67 U.S. artists was a bewildering sea of unknown names and works. Small groups, picking favorites, quickly formed in front of Ben Shahn's Squash Court and U.S. Primitive Joseph Pickett's Manchester Valley. Contemporary U.S. abstract art proved almost too much to take. Among the sculptures, only Richard Lippold's shimmering construction of chromium and stainless-steel wires and Alexander Calder's familiar mobiles drew much appreciative comment. French artists took a hard, professional look at Jackson Pollock's chaotic drip paintings and Clyfford Still's brooding black canvas. But most Parisians, rocked by what they considered a meaningless world, gave up trying to find anything "American" in most U.S. abstractionists.

Excitement in the Air. French critics went along with the gallerygoers, found much to praise in U.S. architecture and movies and plenty to pan in painting and sculpture. L'Aurore made a common judgment: "American painting, while trying to acquire a character of its own, nevertheless still reflects the convulsions, detours, experiments and revolutions of European art."

The exhibit started no sweep of enthusiasm for contemporary American taste in painting. But two days after the opening, the Americans decided they could relax. Visitors thronged to the show, including nearly every name artist in Paris. Said Museum of Modern Art Director Rene d'Harnoncourt: "We didn't expect a miracle. Something would have been drastically wrong if a miracle had happened. But there is excitement in the air. When the museum guards were happy, I knew we had a success. Guards hate to be in an unpopular show."

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