Straight Lines & Curves

Manhattan's 57th Street is where artist meets buyers in the U.S. The art dealers, who have to charge up to 50% commission to pay 57th Street's high rents, and the art critics, who have to scurry all season to cover the Street's scores of important shows, both regard 57th as the yardstick of art. Last week the scurrying slowed, the season waned, and dealers and critics sat back to review the "trends."

More artists were painting more abstractions than ever before. Even so, the standouts of the season were not abstractionists, but men who put awareness of nature and strong emotions ahead of nice design. Among the hit shows: Russia's Marc Chagall (who paints self-playing violins and purple cows in his clouds), Buffalo's Charles Burchfield and Germany's passionate Max Beckmann. To all of them, beauty was a matter of feeling.

To the surrealists, who were more noisy than numerous, beauty was just the stuff that dreams are made of. Salvador Dali still led the somnambulating flock, with pictures brilliant, boneless and as bland as the fried eggs he claims to have seen while he was still in his mother's womb.

The critics no longer voted conservative, but technicians like John Whorf and Robert Strong Woodward, the Robert A. Tafts of art, kept right on pleasing the public with the kind of landscapes which recall vacations in the country. There were brief 57th Street appearances by Philip Evergood, George Biddle and other reporters of suffering and war, who did their best to give art a message.

But hundreds of perfectly respectable artists were unsure of their feelings and unable to remember their dreams. They preferred looking at a tree to painting it. They were the abstractionists.

The Itch of Lines. Socrates once held that "straight lines and curves and the shapes made from them . . . are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are, but are always by their very nature beautiful, and give pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of desire; and colors of this kind are beautiful, too, and give a similar pleasure." If a Greek philosopher's esthetics of 2,300 years ago could still be considered revolutionary, this year's trend in art was well to the left.

Not all the left-wingers thought alike. Karl Knaths, Lyonel Feininger and Lee Gatch recognized the dominion of nature; liked bending its straight lines, straightening its curves and complicating its colors to suit their fancies.

Others, like Adolph Gottlieb, Alexander Calder and Seattle's Mark Tobey included recognizable chunks of nature, like pieces of mosaic, in the careful wreckage of their pictures. Usually (as in Gottlieb's Pictograph), the symbols seemed more important than the paintings.

Inside, & to the Left. On the extreme left, Robert Motherwell and I. Rice Pereira never so much as peeked out of the window. They compared their art to music, which seldom has tangible subject matter either; talked about "reverence for the materials" (meaning paint and canvas, which could be controlled) instead of nature, which was too big and too confusing. They invented rigid, severely pointless patterns.

Although most Manhattan critics and gallerygoers believed they "understood" purely abstract art, few genuinely enjoyed it. Doubters asked how paintings like Pereira's Quadrangles in Two Planes could possibly be understood, since they contained no food for thought whatsoever. But straight lines and curves seemed to be fun for artists to fool with; and whether it made sense or not, abstractionism was the mood of the hour, if not the day.

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