New Look for Old Tradition

For 62 years, the Biennial of Washington's Corcoran Gallery has been a landmark of sorts. It was one of the few competitions to award gold, silver, bronze and copper medals to U.S. painters. Dignitaries attended it, men of probity sat on its juries. Unfortunately, the show often ended up as a hodgepodge of paintings submitted by amateur and professional artists of every conceivable age and stripe. The result was a tradition of timidity.

Last week the Corcoran opened its 31st Biennial, and it proved to be a radical change from its predecessors. Other Biennials crowded their disparate paintings cheek by jowl in a few large galleries. In this show, each of 22 selected artists got a room of his own. The selections were made by James Harithas, the young (35) new director of the old Corcoran, who is intent on rescuing the Corcoran from its own traditions.

Up the Mountain. His notion is that the Biennial should be a means to introduce Washingtonians to the most avant-garde developments taking place elsewhere in the country. He dispensed with the traditional jury and appointed himself as sole arbiter. He set out to find a "really responsible cross-section of what is happening in abstract painting." In place of "winners," he selected six works he will recommend to the trustees for purchase awards. Harithas combed studios from New York to Los Angeles, even trudged 8,000 feet up a Colorado mountain to look at Dean Fleming's latest work. To his mild dismay, he discovered that Fleming had taken to crafting shaped canvases that were designed to be tacked on trees. Harithas settled for several of the artist's 1967 works.

For several younger artists, notably Peter Young, Dan Christensen, Tom Holland, and Lee Lozano, his choice gave them (in effect) their first exhibition. The general effect is of jet-age space. Within gigantic canvases, Harithas' young artists explore a dozen variants of the new, airy, softly Expressionistic forms. In Western Air, Darby Bannard, 37, for instance, whips clouds of Dutch Boy house paints into a composition that contrasts Hollywood-pink plane geometry with cumulus skies. Harithas has also included several senior practitioners to illustrate the point that what makes a trend is a lot of artists doing what a hardy few have been doing for some time. Chief among the older group is I. Rice Pereira, 67, whose Fourth Power is totally different but peculiarly parallel to Bannard's work. With the aplomb of an established professional, she sets sharp, red periscope forms, like so many geometric Loch Ness monsters, tilting serenely at the cloudy deep of a triple-layer sky.

Displaced Bronco. For Harithas, the Biennial is only an episode in a revolution that the Corcoran trustees sanctioned last year when they retired Hermann Warner Williams Jr., 60, and installed Harithas in his stead. They were simply reading the handwriting on the crumbling wall. Founded by William Wilson Corcoran, a banker so rich that he underwrote almost singlehanded the U.S. Government debts for the Mexican-American War, the Corcoran was intended as a repository for and celebration of then-neglected U.S. art. This task is being taken over, in one way or another, by federally backed museums, particularly the recently opened National Collection of Fine Arts and the Hirshhorn Museum, currently abuilding. The Corcoran decided to carve out a new area of its own--specifically, to concentrate on exhibitions designed to serve and educate the Washington community itself.

With this kind of franchise, Harithas has mounted a series of one-man shows for local artists, both black and white. There have been jazz concerts in the gallery's atrium, where Tony Smith's looming Smoke has displaced Remington's bronze of a prancing bronco. Not all of the Corcoran's longtime supporters like the new look. But, for better or for worse, the gallery is determined not to be the same old Corcoran.

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