The Postwar Decade

What has been art's course in the decade since World War II? Future historians may be able to chart it neatly. Contemporaries cannot, for most art of any age is chaff which only the winds of time winnow away. But by the same token, the living can see more of today's art, good and bad. than future historians ever will. Last week the work of close to a thousand postwar artists was on view in New York City alone. The spring downpour of big survey exhibitions offered a new and broad perspective of contemporary art.

AT THE MODERN

The Museum of Modern Art opened a show of 22 European painters and sculptors who have gained prominence in the past decade. The choice betrayed the museum's natural predilection for unmistakably modern, i.e., abstract, work. But within the international mode, the exhibition displayed a surprising variety of national traits.

France was most heavily represented, with seven artists, and made the poorest showing. Its entries were mostly tasteful, but merely tasteful. Germany did better. Hans Uhlmann offered abstract metal sculptures that look gay as birds yet precisely engineered as bridges. Fritz Winter's contrastingly gloomy canvases showed what dim-lit richness a few masterfully placed bars and smears of color can assume. The British contingent was all grim, and saved from dullness only by the brilliant horror pictures of Francis Bacon (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953), who can make a painted face seem to shout out loud.

Italy stole the show at the Modern.

Rome's Alberto Burri even managed to be pleasantly shocking. His "pictures" consisted chiefly of ripped, patched and pasted burlap. Sculptor Mirko (last name, Basaldella) exhibited four metal abstractions in four separate styles, each startlingly successful. His Chimera has the still aliveness of an ancient Chinese bronze; his Architectonic Element is a single sheet of brass cut and bent to take the light as elaborately as a great scarred cliff.

Mirko's brother, Afro, offered the most rewarding canvases of all: Afro's abstractions seem always on the point of becoming recognizable, like reflections in a rippling pool. His spiderweb lines and frosted glass colors move and shimmer delightfully, seeming to change with the mood of the observer. Like all first-rate artists, Afro knows exactly what he is about. "Can the rigorously formal organism of a painting," he asks, "contain the lightness, the living breath of an evocation, the leap or shudder of memory? This, for me, is the problem."

AT THE WHITNEY

The neighboring Whitney Museum put on a sisterly show of 35 U.S. painters and sculptors who have emerged since World War II. There, as at the Modern, abstractionists predominated. But the Whitney did include a few comparatively realistic painters, whose work showed to disadvantage. Come upon in a forest of big, cloudy abstractions, the realists' efforts looked rather like stumps, stiff and dead.

The Whitney's show underlined a curious gloom in U.S. sculptors today. Mostly they weld metal figures of a tormented yet unsympathetic sort. Forbiddingly invested with knobs, prickles and outright spikes, the figures imprison a bit of free air and defy anyone to invade it. David Hare's sculptures were a happy exception to the grim parade. Long dour as the rest, Hare has now invented a new and carefree impressionism. His Sunrise creates an effect of light and loftiness out of a rock, some steel bars and cut bronze sheets tinted with gold. Another exception was Richard Lippold, who makes exquisite geometric constructions of thin wire.

The abstract painters at the Whitney showed even more brass than the sculptors. They generally displayed huge canvases, as the fashion is, but made some concession to hanging problems by favoring very tall pictures instead of very wide ones. Most followed the lead of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the proconsuls of abstract expressionism, in energetically weaving fat tangles of paint over their yards and yards of canvas. Yet taken for what it was--decoration--the effect was often charming. Such expert practitioners as Theodores Stamos, James Brooks and the late Bradley Walker Tomlin manage to enfold the observer in a dreamlike flux of colors that goes on and on, like a boat ride around a small pond.

AT THE BROOKLYN One fact buoys up the average gallery-and museumgoer faced with the massive annual outpouring of U.S. art: much of it is safely dammed up in familiar bayous.

Such preserves are the 296-artist show of the American Watercolor Society's recent annual and the ago-work Manhattan show of the National Association of Women Artists. Both are, in the main, muffled echoes of yesteryear. By contrast, Brooklyn Museum's aggressively progressive International Water Color Exhibition, showing the works of no U.S. artists plus a selection of French and Japanese water-colorists, is clear evidence that the abstractionist tide is still in full flood, with no ebb in sight.

The museum's walls were covered with moody, swirling blobs of color, as otherworldly as their titles (Strata No. 1, Tones of Silence, Pad '55). Only here and there does an oldtimer hold out. Ben Shahn in Second Super Market makes a tasteful composition out of wire grocery carts; the '303 echo in Philip Evergood's Quick Lunch, a ham-handed working man swigging a soft drink; Morris Graves's Bird is deftly caught on thin rice paper with a Chinese economy of line. But they are small islands of representation in a swirl of abstraction. Emphasizing the trend is Brooklyn Museum's only U.S. purchase. Two Points of Interest by Brooklyn Artist Edmond Casarella, 34, is a scrawled composition of broken space which slowly unjangles to reveal forms suggesting an apartment house, shades half drawn, laundry on the line, and a peek into a bedroom with a closed door.

The surprise of the show was the work of 26 modern Japanese watercolorists. One glance showed that the long East-to-West flow of Japanese art (which has influenced Western artists from Toulouse-Lautrec to Frank Lloyd Wright) has now become two-way traffic. But Japanese artists clearly start with one big advantage: a sureness and authority in their brush strokes that few Westerners can match. An artist like Masanari Murai, in his Portrait in Round Face, can draw in one bold stroke a figure that combines the grace of Japanese calligraphy with the solidity of welded iron.

AT THE STABLE

Easily the most belligerent, bombastic show in Manhattan is the annual avant-garde event known as the Stable Show. A compound of confusion and bedlam mainly calling itself abstract expressionism, with a thin right wing of romantic realists, the group show started four years ago in a vacant Greenwich Village store. Moved uptown three years ago to the Stable Gallery, formerly a shelter for riding horses just off Central Park, the show remains a family affair. Artists are invited by name, may submit anything. The public puzzles out what it can from the family quarrels, jokes and plagiarism.

In its uninhibited manner, this year's Stable Show of 185 painters and sculptors lived up to its reputation as a grab bag of new trends and names. Rank newcomers appeared side by side with such old standbys as Painters Willem de Kooning, John Ferren, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb and William Baziotes and Sculptor Ibram Las-saw. As usual, the show was packed with surprises. Greeting the visitors at the door was an all black oil. Upstairs, in the former hayloft, hung a Jukesian version of a Renoir nude, next to a pink-skyed Main Street by Fairfield Porter that might have been dashed off circa 1912. Hit of the show was a sort of automated secretary by Sculpture-Welder Richard Stankiewicz. Its ingredients: a rusty, antique typewriter embedded in a powder-blue boiler with several bent-rod legs and arms. Most original effort: the work of self-taught Corrado Marca-Relli, 41, whose paintings are composed of white upon white strips of canvas, pasted together to a depth of six to ten layers.

Taken all together, last week's roundup shows enforced an unhappy conclusion: art is in the doldrums and has been for the past decade. An age in which such minor talents as Italy's burlap-sewing Burri, Britain's macabre Bacon and America's happy-go-lucky Hare assume major importance can hardly be called great. But Picasso's giant contribution continues, and a handful of artists young enough to be his sons give hope of better years ahead. For all its determined excesses, the younger generation does not seem likely to achieve breakthroughs on a variety of fronts, as did the moderns of the early 19005 (see color pages). More probable is a slow retreat from the extremes of the postwar decade to a subtler abstractionism enriched by the contemplation of nature.

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