Painter of Presences

Some Americans who visit Rome lose their wallets. Stephen Greene. 44. lost his style. Already established as a figurative artist, he won a coveted Prix de Rome in 1949. but cut it short after three months and returned to the U.S. shattered and ill. After he recuperated, he painted a stark, disturbing study of a skeleton crucified on an easel.

Four years later, Greene went to Rome again, and "became dissatisfied with everything I was doing. To turn away from anything that was a scene rather than a presence became important." How far Greene has turned away is chronicled in his first major retrospective, a striking array of 40 paintings and 20 drawings presently on view at Washington's Corcoran Gallery and due to tour the U.S. before reaching Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery a year from now.

The Knowledge of Death. Before Rome, Greene used to paint frozen tableaux that mirrored modern existentialist ideas. He trapped his figures--as in Sartre's No Exit--in shallow doorless and windowless spaces, amputated their legs, and left them relying on crutches. The Burial (see color) shows a legless living cadaver sprawled in a coffin, stifling back a scream with his hand--a scream that comes from "the pain of knowledge of that death in life which we begin experiencing early," Greene explains. Behind the coffin lid, a mourner gestures upward as if in hope. But his candle remains unlit.

Then came Greene's two traumatic visits to Rome. While there in 1953. Greene struggled almost a year with one large picture, and destroyed it. One day. for the first time, he looked at some ancient mosaics and began to break up his surfaces with flickering brushstrokes hotly hued like autumn leaves. Anatomical outlines melted in fiery new colors and--as if blinded by noon light--Greene began to paint hallucinatory presences peering through masking blue planes. Color began to operate as symbol: orange for passion, blue for infinity. Departure, done in 1961, contains a dismembered, bony elbow reminiscent of his maimed early figures, but now serving as one of the presences, like intruders into a tranquil world, that sweep in from the painting's edges to perform a ritual in the center.

Pictures of Visions. "I'm not an abstract expressionist," Greene insists, and in his works he can find plumply rounded female forms and filamentlike masculine figures. "Some people call me a symbolist, but that alone is not a style. Painters might be the last great religious people, in the sense of having a vision. Yet if we really knew what we were painting, most of us would commit suicide." Though Greene's late oils are flamboyant with color, the dark side persists in black maws that gape open in his canvases. "There is always something terrible happening in a beautiful world. But everything is not all black--and if it's not all black, it's not a total tragedy."

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