The Bottle & I

Through the cold-water flats, walk-up studios, automats and bars where Manhattan's artists live and congregate buzzed disturbing news: the first major defection from the ranks of the abstract expressionists had taken place. Longtime Abstractionist John Ferren, 51, had hung a show of his new paintings in which nearly every canvas was centered around an all-too-recognizable bottle, beaker, carafe or cognac glass. What had the artists buzzing was why Ferren had hit on the bottle, and what had hit him hard enough to make him turn his back on the abstractionists' decade of painting for paint's sake?

Ball of Fire. Surrounded by his new creations--done in hot yellows, blues and "searing crimsons, and flecked over with brush strokes in glittering silver and gold that often made them appear to be glowing chalices--Ferren admitted he was as surprised as his old comrades in arms. "What does it mean?" he asked. "You tell me. This hits a man right down where he ticks. All I know is that it had to happen. First I started with two lines, like a figure; then came a central ball of fire in a parenthesis. I closed the parenthesis, and there was a vase. I fought against it, but once I had accepted the limitations of a central image, I never felt freer. These are even more free than any drip thing I ever did."

What made Ferren's conversion significant is that he is one of the oldest abstractionists going, with an established prewar-Paris reputation. In the '30s he rated one-man shows, shared gallery space in group shows with such now famous moderns as Alberto Giacometti, Arp, Hans Hartung and Kandinsky. Gertrude Stein, who had taken a shine to the strapping, red-haired painter from Pendleton, Ore., announced in Everybody's Autobiography: "He is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might only perhaps nobody can do that thing called abstract painting."

Back in Manhattan after World War II service overseas in the Psychological Warfare Division (SHAEF), Ferren soon became a leading practitioner and exponent of the new abstract expressionist movement, was a founding member of the artists' informal Greenwich Village headquarters, "The Club," served on the selection committee for the 1949 "Ninth Street Show," which pulled together Manhattan's abstract artists in one big show for the first time.

Through the Sound Barrier. The effort involved in reorienting around a central image seemed as hard to Ferren as "breaking through the sound barrier." In fact, some such move has long been in the offing. Abstractionist Willem de Kooning first tried it with his grotesque woman images (TIME, April 4, 1953), only to relapse into abstraction. Drip Originator Jackson Pollock was himself struggling with half-glimpsed totem images before his death in an auto crash last August. Younger painters are now pulling and punching areas of pigment on their canvases to achieve a new-found "landscape look" that has been dubbed abstract impressionism.

Whether Ferren's departure will finally signal a period of order, after the last decade's splash, leaves Ferren, for the moment, unworried. Says he: "For me, painting was desperate for a long time. There was a kind of longing for salvation. Here, somehow, I have it."

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