Hot-Rod Heraldry

PAINTING

The New York art scene has taken on an English accent. Sotheby's of London owns Parke-Bernet. At times there are as many young British artists in the U.S. as there are in London. One of them, Gerald Laing, 29, is little known in his native land and admits that his in spiration is the American hot-rod.

"The customized, homemade hot-rod is American folk art," says Laing. "The car is escape, the home on wheels, the second self, the great American dream. Racing them has as much ritual as the Japanese tea ceremony." He even brought his own hot-rod to London last summer. The chopped-down 1930 Ford roadster with an exposed, chrome-plated 1955 Chevrolet engine and Offenhauser manifolds drew more attention than a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud with the Queen inside. He sold it at a London traffic light.

Laing abstracts the hot-rod esthetic in paintings on brass and aluminum that hinge and bend to slither up the walls or across the floor. They employ the customized car lingo in their textures: chrome and riots of rainbow "flake" (colored metal chips frozen in sprayed vinyl) finishes. They take the serpentine ripple of flames painted on the sides of racing cars, the flapping forms of the parachutes used to slow giant dragsters. Before Laing's one-man show in Manhattan opened last week at the Richard Feigen Gallery, they also were completely sold out.

Son of an army major, Laing made an unlikely switch from arms to art. A Sandhurst graduate, he was a lieutenant in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers for four years, resigned to enter a London art school. At first, Laing had a "hairy idea about art." He was a bug on things historical, vaguely Arthurian, and even named his daughter Yseult. One day, he saw a photographic essay on sky diving. The imagery of swooping man below the billowing, brightly colored gores of a parachute combined his interest in the contem porary heroic figure with a desire for strong formal arrangement.

From parachutes he moved on to the quintessential custom car, the dragster, whose only purpose is to accelerate over a quarter-mile straightaway to speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h. "Only an incredibly sophisticated people," he says, "would lavish expensive attention on things of such limited use." He portrayed the goggled drivers with hand-painted benday dots to make them look like newspaper photographs.

Laing's new works have lost such pop overtones. Their darting shapes are abstract, fragmentary, peripheral visions of speed. The human figure is gone. Some of his titles, such as Pennon and Gyron, derive from heraldry. As to who the knights of the road are in a society that builds automobiles in the backyard and reveres them as wheeled victories, Laing lets his work speak for itself: viewers staring into the chrome will catch a glimmering reflection of themselves.

GRAPHICS

Pointing to God

In the strong sunlight that bathes Italy, the Renaissance masters reveled in huge walls of spectrum-splattered fresco. In darker Northern Europe, the Renaissance first came in the more compact fashion of the graphic arts, in which line dominates color. And no one in the Renaissance drew a finer line than Albrecht Duerer (see color).

Draftsmanship came naturally to the Nuremberg-born goldsmith's son. As a boyhood apprentice, Duerer learned to control the sharp burin as it plowed ornamental--and indelible--lines across the rich metal. At 15, he got his father's permission to study art, and he turned his point to image making. Even before his death in 1528, Duerer's chop M., a reminder of his goldsmith's training, was known across Europe. To show the full range of his accomplishment, 150 drawings by him and his contemporaries have been assembled from the State Museum in Berlin by the Smithsonian Institution.* They show that Duerer almost singlehanded brought the Renaissance north of the Alps.

Beauty in a Wart. Diirer was 23 when he made his first of several trips to Italy. There he saw the orderly beauties of Greco-Roman antiquity, heightened through the Renaissance eyes of Mantegna and Da Vinci. Their cool confidence in man vied with his apocalyptic Gothic attitudes. He never got over all of them, recorded a nightmare in 1525: "Many big waters fell from the firmament, with great violence and with enormous noise, and drowned the whole land." But he asserted the new idea that the visible world was the true subject of art.

Man, for Duerer, stood squarely in the center of the visible universe. "The Creator fashioned men once and for all as they must be," he wrote, "and I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men." He approached the problems of expressing that perfection, even down to the microscopic depiction of a wart. In his Four Books on Human Proportion, he analyzed anatomy with all the rigor of Euclidean geometry. Yet with the pricking of his pens and burins, he tried to capture all the sensual volumes that the Italian sculptors revealed in marble with the deft chipping of their chisels.

Divinity in a Drawing. In Duerer's day, art works were valued like dry-goods--by the size, hours of labor and the material. As a new humanist, he protested that as art represented man more accurately, it approached divinity more closely. So a tiny drawing, if divinely inspired, could be more artistic than a giant altarpiece. "Verily, art is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it," Duerer declared. And to make certain that his insight would be recognized, he became one of the first to sign and date even his most incidental drawings. In this he was fully justified, for his drawings became collector's items in his day. And they have remained collector's items ever since.

* The exhibition, which opens this week in Washington's National Gallery, travels next to New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and finally Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

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