Progressive Seebang

There was a touch of surrealism as a green Paris bus and a red London double-decker plied Manhattan's Madison Avenue, all for the sake of getting art lovers there in time. There was gracious classicism as 2,000 gallerygoers in black tie and Balenciagas raced up and down 22 city blocks all evening long, trying to take in one another, champagne, and a staggering array of art works. There was even pop enthusiasm as girls in thigh-high miniskirts buzzed to and fro on the back seats of motorcycles.

The occasion was the $25-a-ticket opening night of "Seven Decades," a survey of art since 1895 spread through ten commercial galleries,* with 371 works on view, almost half of them borrowed from private collections. The whole seebang is a benefit for the Public Education Association, and never has the progressive dining on art been so rich, varied and fruitful.

Ironclad's Shock Waves. "Seven Decades" has all the trimmings of a museum survey, including a 192-page catalogue. The show was picked by former Museum of Modern Art Curator Peter Selz, now director of the University of California's Berkeley art museum, from 151 private collections, 28 museums and 35 galleries. Instead of dividing modern art into isms, the exhibition weaves together art of different styles but similar dates. The insights available are therefore less preachy than head snapping.

For all the clash of contrasting styles, curious continuities emerge. Kinetic art, one of the latest movements, represented by Sculptors Jean Tinguely and Pol Bury, is foreshadowed by Gino Severini's The Armored Train (opposite page), an example of World War I futurism that abstracts the warring motion of an ironclad railway car into shock waves, lacking only POW! ZIP! BAM! in cartoon balloons to become pop art. And Severini died just this year at the age of 83. Optical art is another trend of the '60s. Yet a flat pattern of particolored isosceles triangles called Iridescent Interpenetration No. 3 by another futurist, Giacomo Balla, and dated 1912, is clearly a harbinger of op.

Fear of Another Kind. Juxtapositions of paintings also suggest hitherto unexpected correspondences. In the decade 1925 through 1934 are works by such divergent artists as that arcane, Swiss-born Bauhaus prof, Paul Klee, the Chicago anatomist of decay, Ivan Albright, the tragic expressionist Arshile Gorky, and the U.S.'s clown-painting Walt Kuhn. In paintings executed within a three-year span, each depicts man masked in dreadful isolation.

Gorky blurs bodies off from the flat, pastry-oval visages of The Artist and His Mother, a memory portrait that bridges from surrealism to the beginnings of abstract expressionism. Klee mimes a four-footed animal in his calligraphic Mask of Fear. Kuhn creates another kind of mask--that of the silent, sad clown--and makes it a vision of man turned into useless performer, while Albright excoriates the self in his wrinkly "And God Created Man in His Own Image." Unrelated by style or influence, each artist nonetheless portrays man in the early Depression years as a desperate creature searching for identity, not sorrow.

Rebellion & Innovation. Bradley Walker Tomlin's abstract expressionism (see overleaf) with its mingling of signature brush strokes, does not seem so far removed in its liquid pastel forms from Pop Artist James Rosenquist's more explicit Fruit Salad. Larry Poons's placement of blue spots on a field of gold in Aqua Regia produces a Mexican-jumping-bean effect of afterimage dots; yet he has no more corner on optical effects than Bonnard, whom one young first-nighter enjoyed as "a guy who used phosphorescent, Day-glo paint before the stuff was invented or used."

Aim of the "Seven Decades" survey, as its selector Selz explained it, was to reveal "rebellion and innovation, qualities vital to the life of art." And the rebellion and innovation are far from over. After the galleries closed down about midnight, those of the opening-night travelers with sufficient stamina dashed up Fifth Avenue to the Jewish Museum to catch the tail end of yet another opening. There, 42 young U.S. and British sculptors launched what may be a new art movement. The new trend is all bare pipe and unadorned steel, and it trumpets "less is more" as its philosophical basis. Its name: Minimal Art.

* During the exhibit's month-long stay, the decades are divided among the following Manhattan art dealers: Paul Rosenberg, 1895-1904; M. Knoedler, 1905-1914; Perls and E. V. Thaw, 1915-1924; Saidenberg and Stephen Hahn, 1925-1934; Pierre Matisse, 1935-1944; Andre Emmerich and Odyssia, 1945-1954; Cordier & Ekstrom, 1955-1965.

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