Too Hot to Handle

An enterprising Manhattan dealer this week opened a show that was likely to shock two kinds of people: 1) Christians, 2) lovers of the beautiful. An exhibition of modern religious painting, it was un likely to win any converts to religion--or to modern art, either. Samples:

P: Max Beckmann's grim, ghastly Descent from the Cross -- an expressionistic night mare which might have been influenced by the 3rd-Century belief that Christ was the ugliest of men (because He bore the sins of the world in His body).

P: Marsden Hartley's garish Three Friends, which showed Christ flanked by a hairy prize fighter and a clown. (Hartley, in a poem he wrote about it, says that the athlete and the clown had suffered almost as much as Christ.)

P: Abraham Rattner's colorful, confusing Transcendence, in which Christ seems to have five or six wobbly overlapping heads, arranged like the pleats of an accordion.

P: Pablo Picasso's 1930 semi-abstract Crucifixion, a crowded arrangement of pea-green, red and yellow limbs and lumps, in which Christ's face is a tiny knot of pain in the center of a doorknob-shaped skull.

P: Mark Tobey's Dormition of the Virgin (loaned by a Seattle minister), which looked like a dirty tangle of white twine lying on a board. The title was no help.*

P: Josef Scharl's simple, powerful Gethsemane. A head-on study of the Agony in the Garden, it had the human impact and the somber, Protestant force (but not the masterful painting) of a Christ by Rem brandt.

More than anything, the exhibition seemed to prove that 20th-Century art is far too subjective for the telling of uni versal truths. The life-loving men who carved the story of Christ in stone or set it in stained-glass windows for medieval Europe to read did it incomparably better. The subject matter of art's great periods has apparently become too hot for modern art to handle.

* Dormition means falling asleep.

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