The Reappearing Figure

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which was probably the chief critical influence in developing the great outpouring of American abstractionism of the last 15 years, this week puts on a significant show of new U.S. figure painting. The mere fact of the show certainly means that abstraction is going to have to move over and make room for a new kind of U.S. representationalism. Yet much of the excitement of the figure paintings traces back to abstraction. The paintings come from artists who learned color, brushwork, emotionalism and intuition through abstraction--or, conversely, from artists who stuck to saving faces and figures in bitter resistance to abstractionism's popularity and rich returns.

In many of the 74 paintings, the figures look as if they were refugees from a nightmare; and even when portrayed with all their limbs and features intact, they are often placed in strange and disturbing settings. Whereas the Greeks celebrated the figure for its external beauty, today's U.S.

figure painters use it to express internal tension or even combustion.

Work began on the show two years ago when the museum sent thousands of letters to U.S. artists, galleries and art schools asking them to submit photographs of figurative work done since 1958.

By the end of March 1961, the museum had received 9,495 photographs from 1,841 painters. A trio of curators winnowed these down, asked 150 artists to send along the actual paintings, from which Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. made the final selection. The whole procedure, while precluding definitiveness, has its diplomatic advantages. When viewers note the absence of their personal favorites, the museum can quote the catalogue: "The selection was determined by the entries received." Within these limitations, the show covers an astonishing range, which should prove to even the most doctrinaire of abstractionists that an attachment to reality is not necessarily a manacle for the mind. As Alfred Barr puts it: "Men have been painting their own image for many thousands of years, but it is probable that never before, within one time and one country, has the human figure been painted with the prodigious variety of forms even this small exhibition suggests."

The painters of the figure talk of their work and its relation to abstraction with emotions that go from gratitude to scorn. Sidney Goodman, 26, the teacher at the

Philadelphia Museum College of Art who painted Find a Way (reproduced oppo site), says gently: "I suppose I do what I want to do, and what I want to do concerns more than just shapes, forms and colors with no relation to a subject." As in many cases with figurative work, he makes vagueness a virtue. There is no definite reason why two figures should be made to float around like Zeppelins while a third remains bound to an ambiguous landscape.

Yet all the figures seem to be groping for something, and the viewer finds himself groping too. What at first seemed to be melodramatic whimsy turns out to be genuine mystery.

Denver-born Robert Beauchamp, 38, studied under Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, but in 1953 returned to the figure. "It was an emotional thing," he says. "I felt abstract art was too remote from immediate life, that I had to wear blinkers when I walked out onto the street." His use of color goes back to the German expressionists ("I reverted to what had preceded Hofmann"), but the fantasy is all Beauchamp. His creatures crouch or dance in junglelike settings, seem often to be engaged in some sort of orgy. Beauchamp is unable to explain why his fantasy takes the direction it does.

Like the abstract expressionists, he lets his paintings have a life of their own.

Jules Kirschenbaum, 32, and his Latvian-born wife, Cornelis Ruhtenberg, had both always painted realistically, though she once tried abstraction ("It seemed awfully easy"). Painter Ruhtenberg likes to show "figures against space, to get figures against a flat background without making perspective." In Potiphar's Wife (see overleaf), the running man balances the seated figure: "The problem was to have a contained picture, yet have movement." In Kirschenbaum's Sleeping Figures, the problem was to achieve "the dreamlike qualities of everything becoming different yet clear." The fact that everything in the lush arabesque is not really clear produces a frustrating ambiguity, but the ambiguity is haunting, too, like the ambiguity of dreams.

Opposite Directions. At first glance, it might seem as if Jacob Landau, 44, had come out of the same school as Robert Broderson, 41. In both Cinna the Poet (overleaf) and New Myth-Mine Disaster (last color page), the tortured figures look as if they were about to be torn apart.

But the two artists take entirely different approaches to their work. Broderson, who learned much from painting abstractions --"surfaces, various ways of using paint and the like"--starts a picture with only the vaguest idea in mind, lets it evolve on the canvas, a characteristic of action painters. Landau's Cinna was inspired partly by the Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar and partly by the brutality of Naziism in World War II. While many of the new figurative painters tend to use the figure as just another object or form, Landau is brave enough to admit to being concerned with "the condition of man." Ben Kamihira (overleaf), Joseph Hirsch and Ralph Borge (last page) do not use distortion to achieve a sense of drama; their paintings rely more on a subtle or unexpected arrangement of the figures and objects. Hirsch's Coronation had its origins in certain impressions of World War II--of white doctors treating dark-skinned natives and Negro medics caring for white G.I.s. This compassion between the races has long fascinated Hirsch, and his paintings tend to have a religious overtone. The hand swabbing the boxer's brow is to Hirsch almost as much the focal point of the painting as the boxer himself. Hirsch likens it to a kind of benediction.

Conflicting Emotions. Kamihira's Wedding Dress began with a childhood memory of his mother, a Japanese immigrant.

This led him to think of European war brides and finally the wedding dress. The flight of association might just as well have .started with the dress and gone the other way. Kamihira has an eerie ability to fill his carefully composed interiors with conflicting emotions. The painting evokes such heavy sadness that the white satin becomes not a dress for a bride but a robe for a sacrifice. Few artists use pure stagecraft more effectively.

The same qualities--a fascination with texture and a gift for drama--are in Ralph Borge's painting of the Negro male and white female nudes. Borge's chief device is paradox: "The heightened attention to realism casts a spell of logic about the painting which it does not really have." If there is one thing the figurative artists have in common, it is a reverence for mystery, and Borge uses his precise craftsmanship to achieve the exact opposite of precision. What are those two people doing in that field? Why does the mirror cast no reflection? Why is the tombstone turned into a scarecrow? "If I knew the answers," says Borge, "I would be Norman Rockwell. He can leave nothing to the imagination." Inevitably the exhibition has its share of horrors, and occasionally the figure is scarcely visible at all. In one apparent abstraction, the figure turns out to be a piece of back seen from the shoulder blades to the buttocks. There are times, too, when the artists seem more anxious to shock than produce a work of art. Yet the range is the important thing--from a charming little girl by Jean Seidenberg to a grizzly Mussolini hanging by his heels, from a regally wrinkled Elsa Maxwell by Rene Bouche to a witty, wispy Miss New Jersey I by Larry Rivers to a scrofulous Seated Boxer I by Leon Golub. At times the human figure is shamelessly exploited, but the net effect of the show is one of exhilaration. Today's figurative painters are not so much concerned with the human body as with saying something about human life.

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