SALUTE TO AN OLD SPRING

BUFFALO'S Albright Gallery last week celebrated its 50th anniversary with an appropriate flourish: a loan show surveying the world of art at the time the museum was born. On exhibition were 50 pictures, all painted in the fertile years between 1905 and 1913 (see color pages}, the seedtime of 20th century painting.

In the year the Albright was founded, the seeds of modern art had just begun sprouting. In Paris the Fauves (wild leasts) got their first look-in at the official salon, and filled normally gentle art lovers with ire. Such youthful fathers of modern art as Matisse, Dufy, Vlaminck and Derain seemed color-mad to their elders. Pierre Bonnard, meanwhile, was quietly building a highly personal art on the sun-bleached bones of impressionism. Rouault had begun to heat up the subjective oven from which his solemn, molten pictures have since flowed, and Picasso was moving through his "blue period" at full speed. Long before the start of World War I he would push on through an evanescent "pink period" to a neoclassical style, then suddenly stuff everything in a cubist image-grinder.

Vienna's Oskar Kokoschka was beginning a great career of painting as fast and loose as his heart dictated. Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian working in Munich, snapped the cord of recognizability that had bound picturemaking to nature.

Italy's Giorgio de Chirico laid the foundations of surrealism in a vast, interior desert. And in the U.S., George Luks and his fire-eating friends Sloan and Henri (TIME, May 16) were lustily affirming the dignity of ashcans, whores, elevated trains, bums and slum kids as painters' subjects.

Little did the Albright Gallery's founders guess what a Niagara of new art lay ahead. They built a dignified retreat for Victorian notions of the pure and the beautiful, saw it change inevitably into a showplace for free and passionate natures. Today's artists, in Buffalo as elsewhere, look to the invigorating world of the 20th century's pioneer painters as a source from which their own contributions stem.

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