Stark Young, Painter

"I who know the smallness of my voice and the tiny stink of all our journalistic voices repeated wonder if any words of mine could matter much. . . ."

This modest if rhetorical utterance is characteristic of florid, balding, loquacious Stark Young, who has been a discerning critic of art and the theater (in the New Republic and elsewhere) for some 20 years. Stark Young is known also as a best-selling novelist (So Red The Rose), a poet, a playwright, a translator of plays and a lecturer. Last week he made a firm bid to be known as a painter, gave his first exhibition at Manhattan's Friends of Greece, Inc.

Like most of the events in Stark Young's life, this one was a shooting of the most fashionable rapids. He opened the proceedings with a lecture to 53 lady friends of Greece and art, including the Marquise de Talleyrand-Perigord, Countess di Zoppola, Countess Mercati. Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and a clutch of male critics and writers.

Stark Young takes a view of art which is wanning to those tired of abstruse and cerebral esthetics. Says he: "In my opinion a picture should be nostalgic with all we love and follow after in life; but ... it should have finally within it a calm and harmony as if it had arrived at a completeness in itself and its own peace." Young's work in no way suggested that he had been painting for only two years. His solid, slightly impressionistic flower pieces indicated close study of the still-life masters by a man who loves nature as well as art. That Stark Young also loves literature and history was somewhat fruitily evident in his precious titles and subtitles lifted from Francis Thompson, Racine, Leopardi, etc. To Garland of the Garland (credit line: Meleager, in the Greek Anthology), in which a morose young woman in a long white dress sulks on a wall while a garlanded youth wipes his ear with a towel, Stark Young appended a welcome note of explanation: "To the boy the lady seems as beautiful as the magazines. He has been making garlands, and to him she is the garland's very soul." Polyglot as his influences are, most of Young's subjects are native.

"Very Very Southern." Stark Young is known to his friends as an ardent garden er, a collector of objets d'art, "a character, " a wit and a superb teller of un printable stories. He was born in Como, Miss, in 1881. Papa Young was a doctor who, says Stark, would have preferred the role of Southern planter of which the Civil War deprived him. Mama Young was ''very very Scotch, and very very Southern." Stark Young, as his romanticism and rhetoric show, is pretty Southern him self.

He entered the University of Missis sippi when he was only 14 (his prep school had closed because of typhoid spread when a pig fell down a cistern).

He later took a Columbia M.A., spent eleven years teaching English and literature at the Universities of Texas and Mississippi, five more at Amherst. In Italy, which he has visited about 18 times, he used to "go to the galleries the moment the doors opened and stay there all day." If his painting matches the quality of his dramatic criticism, it will be something.

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