Battlefronts

An intermittent war of nerves between painters and public has been going on for centuries. Rembrandt's compassionate paintings of events in the Bible were called rotten, and they sold not at all. Children, incited by their elders, mocked Van Gogh in the streets of Arles. True, many of the world's best painters, from Raphael to Renoir, were ardently embraced by the public even before they died. There have been periods of peace; yet the war continues. This spring it is kicking up a lot of dust. Among the latest skirmishes:

The Publicity Front. Huntington Hartford, A. & P. stores heir and art patron, took full-page ads in six Manhattan newspapers to complain that art worldlings are pulling the wool over the public's eyes. No friend to modern art, Hartford glibly lists "the diseases that infect the world of painting today" as "obscurity, confusion, immorality, violence." He concludes with a call to arms: "Ladies and gentlemen, form your own opinions concerning art . . . and when the high priests of criticism and the museum directors and the teachers of mumbo jumbo thoughout the country suddenly begin to realize that you mean business, you will be astonished . . . how fast they will change their tune." At first, Hartford's targets shrugged him off as a crank with money. Newspaper editorials and letters-to-the-editors, plus arty-party chitchat, have shown in the past month that Hartford does make sense to thousands of people. But his view that art should follow only a middle road--a three-lane, 40-miles-an-hour parkway between photographic realism and emotional expressionism--is too pat to be persuasive. It would sacrifice the adventurousness that often lies at the heart of art for the sake of mild, easy-to-take conformity. Hartford's oldfashioned black powder, however, did contain enough grains of justification and documentation to rattle those ivory towers from which weird obscurities are foisted on the public. And his call for greater public participation in art matters was worth a hearty cheer.

The Educational Front. A $250,000 foundation set up by Montreal Barrister Charles Glass Greenshields will teach young painters the fundamental tech iques and principles of their craft. Greenshields, who paints seashore scenes in his spare time, deplores the fact that few young artists today get enough basic training. He blames "the iconoclasm and unbridled license of a rapidly growing and articulate group of artists and their sup porters who manifest a positive obsession to distort and, where possible, to dispense with all natural forms." Greenshields' huffing and puffing will never blow down the mansion of modern art, for it is no house of cards. But when artists say, as did Montreal Painter Goodridge Roberts, that Greenshields has chosen "a discouraging way to spend so much money," they could not be more wrong.

Galleries today are crammed with the work of supposedly well-trained artists who can draw a straight line but never a recognizable outline, who can make a splashy picture but would have trouble putting a smooth coat of paint on a barn door. Greenshields' foundation will be a small contribution to a great need, for though the important artists of the coming generation cannot be expected to return to Renaissance ideals of art, they should be expected to understand them and to master their basic means.

The Exhibition Front. As part of Boston's annual Arts Festival, painters made a mass invasion of the city's old Public Garden last week and put up a 343-work tent show. Before the opening, the Boston Globe editorialized: ''Why not make a game of it? See how few of the paintings can make fools of us by making us think they say something when all they say is 'Eenie-meenie-meinie-mo.'" Whether as a game or not, the show drew a swarm of viewers. Total attendance may top 700,000.

Actually, only 10% of the paintings were altogether abstract; most entries followed Hartford's middle road. In view of the show's sponsors, the public interest displayed was just as important as the art itself. The main thing, said Festival Chairman Nelson Aldrich happily, "is to prove to the public that art is not out of their ken. that it is part of their lives.

Whatever they get out of it is good, and it is good for the artist, too. I think we are winning." Winning what? Certainly not the war between painters and public, a fight which public interest can only intensify, and which will continue to produce heavy casualties on both sides. Those children and elders who scoffed at Van Gogh helped drive him to madness and death.

On the other side, thousands of plain citizens have let sneering generalities and/or snobbish expertise about modern art blind them to its virtues and its fun. But Aldrich's optimism rightly overleaped the battlefronts of controversy. Painting, after all, does not consist of generalities and cannot be judged or formed by them.

It implies just two specific ingredients: 1) a picture created by one man in the sincerity of his heart for other men to enjoy, and 2) someone looking at it. When contemporary art excites the intense interest apparent in Boston last week, both painters and public gain.

Besides creating interest where little existed before, the shifting battle lines of art controversy tend to erase the cults of willful preciosity on one hand and of lazy ignorance on the other. This is particularly true in the U.S.. where art and snobbery do not necessarily go arm in glove, and where, in increasing millions, people are exposed to art in one way or another every week. As more Americans come to enjoy more pictures, hope grows--not hope for a period of peace between artists and public, but for the possibility of an unprecedented fruitfulness in U.S. art. The second half of the 20th century could conceivably become the most exasperating, most enlivening, most enlightening period in American art history.

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