Pioneers

In the decade before World War I, a few wild young men with paint under their fingernails were planting the weird orchards of modern art. Their shabby Latin Quarter ateliers held the first green fruits of freedom. The sidewalk cafes of Paris rocked and rang with their back-slapping and boasting. Les Fauves, "the wild beasts" and their far-from-tame friends had taken over--Matisse, Braque, Derain, Duchamp, Rouault, and Picasso in command.

They felt a compulsion to go on from where the post-impressionists (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne) left off, and an itch to show that you can forget nature (almost) and still paint pictures.

But painting, like any game, still required a rigidly defined field (or canvas), a number of players (forms and colors), and, finally, rules of play. Instead of imitating nature, referees developed new rules: 1) distorting and arbitrarily recoloring nature for emotional impact (expressionism); 2) chopping nature into small cubes in order to get a good look at it from every angle (cubism); 3) excluding recognizable nature altogether, so that familiar associations would not obscure the geometric interest of the design (abstractionism).

To learn the new rules thoroughly you had to go to Paris--and many young U.S. artists did. Last week Manhattan's Whitney Museum (now under the wing of the arch-conservative Metropolitan) honored the native sons who had brought the principles of Paris back to Manhattan, and had made them stick. In an exhibition called "Pioneers of Modern Art in America," it showed the 1908-22 works of Karfiol, Weber, Demuth, Sheeler, Marin, Hartley, and--surprisingly enough--Thomas Hart Benton.

Roughneck in Paris. According to Benton, Paris had meant merely "a girl friend to take care of you and run you--a lot of talk and an escape into a world of pretense and theory." Two-fisted Tom had "wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along, and it took me ten years to get all that modernist dirt out of my system. I was merely a roughneck with a talent for fighting, perhaps, but not for painting." His muscle-bound expressionist Three Figures, which the Whitney exhibited without comment, proved his words.

Missouri-born Benton repented his bohemian foibles and turned to painting what the Met's Director Francis Henry Taylor describes as "the ample American landscape" (he concentrated on harvest scenes). But even after they returned to Manhattan, most of his Paris friends felt themselves closer to Paris than to the prairie, and some brilliant stay-at-homes (Burchfield, O'Keeffe) felt the same way.

Their champion was famed Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and his "291" gallery of modern art was their headquarters. There Matisse, Rousseau, Cezanne, Picasso, Hartley, Marin and O'Keeffe were introduced to the U.S.

Another Stieglitz protege was Max Weber, whose first, fine-chopped abstractions, like Chinese Restaurant, were harder to take than the India-rubber rabbis he paints now. The New York Times art critics are more sympathetic to him today than was the Timesman who sputtered in 1911: "It is difficult to write of these atrocities with moderation."

Nude in Manhattan. Stieglitz played host to a reckless, determined band. In 1913, the modernists captured Manhattan's huge 69th Regiment Armory, stocked it with some 1,600 examples of French and U.S. modern art. They adopted a motto, "The New Spirit," and distributed thousands of buttons bearing the pine-tree flag of the American Revolution. Probably 250,000 people saw the "Armory Show," and for a good many the experience was horrifying. For a glimpse of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (see cut], they had to stand in line.

Conservative Critic Kenyon Cox sounded a brave but ineffectual clarion: "Believing, as I do, that there are still commandments in art as in morals, and still laws in art as in physics, I have no fear that this kind of art will prevail, or even that it can long endure."

Maybe most people agreed (and still do) with Critic Cox, but most young artists did not. The paintbrush war was over; the modern beachhead was secure. Both sides could settle down to the uneasy truce, punctuated by journalistic skirmishes, which exists today.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.