The Younger Generation

What comes after abstraction? The question is probably still premature, but for trend-sifters who look to the younger generation for clues. Manhattan this week offers possibilities by the dozen. The Whitney Museum of American Art, in its first "Young America" show, is displaying 121 works by 30 artists under 35; the Museum of Modern Art, in its "Recent American Acquisitions," includes works by some two dozen younger painters; the Jewish Museum will open its first younger-artist group show with 58 works by 23 artists developing the theme, "The New York School--Second Generation."

Main fact to emerge is that the shock treatment of the past abstract expressionist decade is giving way to gentler, more lyric works, with a pronounced shift back toward nature. But with this shift the artists are still clinging tenaciously to most of the impassioned painting discoveries and new-found techniques of the older abstractionists. Second and less heartening conclusion is that the horde of painters spawned by the G.I. bill and flourishing art schools has served mainly to swell the ranks of the second-raters, produced only a handful of individual talents.

The result is a cross-rip of conflicting trends, awash with the froth and flotsam of derivative mannerisms and borrowed techniques, with only here and there a standout figure combining endurance, freshness and individual talent. Among those whose work indicates that they bear watching:

P:Wolf Kahn, 30, who first studied with Manhattan's leading abstractionist mentor, Hans Hofmann, then on his own switched to realistic pastels, now paints in a lyric, impressionist style that earns him a place among the Museum of Modern Art's new acquisitions. For his Late Afternoon (opposite), painted last summer in Provincetown, Mass., Kahn derived his inspiration from both the setting and his pretty model, Fellow Artist Emily Mason. He says of the completed work: "I tried to express tranquillity and contentment with overall lightness of tones, general vertical composition and subdued, dancing brush strokes."*

P:Jan Muller, 34, German-born painter who came to the U.S. in 1941, is another Hans Hofmann pupil who still sticks by his abstract teacher's general principles but feels, "Abstract art is too esoteric. The image gives one a wider sense of communication." Now hitting his stride. Muller appears in all three museum shows. His Of This Time, Of That Place (opposite) at the Whitney is a large-scale (4 ft. by 8 ft.) canvas with looming white nudes set against a luxuriant patchwork landscape that draws its theme from Goethe's Erlkoenig.

P:Robert Andrew Parker, 29, lanky father of four, has made a brilliant end run that skirts nearly all the technical thrashing and rehashing that bedevil Manhattan painters. His subjects range from such imaginary portraits as King Gustave of Sweden Tatting to East Riding of Yorkshire Yeomanry Disembarking from H.M.S. Cressy , the fourth in a series of watercolors which sprang from the war games that Parker, a lead-soldier enthusiast, played until recently on the mudflat at suburban Mamaroneck, N.Y. Parker's drenched watercolors. done on rolls of plain shelf paper, now appear in the collections of both the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.

P:Helen Frankenthaler. 28, well-to-do Bennington College graduate ('49), a standout exhibitor in all three shows who ranks high with the elder Abstract Expressionists as one of the few painters to follow in their wake, manages to give her intensely lyric, free-flow paintings a recognizably personal stamp. Up to using anything from a paint pot to her foot to gain her effects, she occasionally relaxes by switching to a meticulous landscape or realistic self-portrait. Says Painter Frankenthaler of her abstract work, "I just start to see what happens. You want clues? There are no clues. No idea makes a picture good or bad."

P:John Levee, 32, a talented new expatriate Paris painter who (along with Sam Francis, 33, and Paul Jenkins, 33) has made a name for himself abroad, was picked for both the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art shows (see overleaf). A U.S. Air Force officer during World War II, Levee went to Paris to study painting on the G.I. bill. First registered at the Academic Julian, he was nearly thrown out for flouting academic standards, wound up sharing the school's Grand Prix second prize with his Parisian wife. Approaching abstraction via Cezanne and the Cubists, Levee also shows the influence of his French contemporaries Pierre Soulages and the late Nicolas de Stael. but now feels his painting is becoming less French, more American, "less architectural, less constructed, more organic."

P:Rosemarie Beck, 33, wife of fledgling Novelist Robert Phelps and mother of an eight-year-old son, is admired for her painterly glazes and sensitive, careful technique. Her House of the Sun--No. 3 (opposite), now at the Whitney, was done over a three-to-five-month period, can be viewed with interest from any direction (for the position in which Painter Beck painted it, rotate page one-quarter turn to the left). Her goal, to achieve "the effect of a new light," bound in from all directions, is ambitious, but she says: "The older generation had the real terror. They took the real risks. They had to break through. We are a generation of magpies. We are not taking the risks the way they did, and we are deceitful if we say that we are."

*In a happy sequel, Artist Kahn, now in Italy, last week married last summer's model in a ceremony conducted by the mayor of Venice.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.