Three-Letter Man

The Letter Man Morris Kantor is one of the select group of artists whose pictures hang in all three big Manhattan museums: the conservative Metropolitan, the middle-minded Whitney, and the freewheeling, streamlined Museum of Modern Art. These diverse honors make Kantor a three-letter man in U.S. painting, but not necessarily an All-American; they are as much a tribute to the diversity as to the quality of his art.

Excepting Picasso, who is the end-all of most switches and surprises in modern art, few can touch Kantor for variety. A mild, quiet little man whose long face is made even longer by his swooping nose and luxuriantly sad mustache, Kantor changes his style with his subjects. Last week at a Manhattan gallery he seemed to be trying two at once. Half the paintings on show were piney, briny souvenirs of Kantor's summers at Monhegan, Me. They looked a little as though they had been pasted together with pine needles and pitch. The other half, not so successful, appeared to be woodenish mannequins with several heads, gilded and decorously draped with penciled nets.

Gallerygoers noted Kantor's never-failing subtlety of color and texture, his sculpturesque use of form, but most of them preferred the more simply enjoyable Cape Cod sand dunes, big trees and haunted houses of previous Kantor phases.

Kantor has had time for half a dozen such phases; he was born half a century ago, in Minsk, Russia. Young Kantor imagined the U.S. as a land of opportunity for his art, but when the hopeful 13-year-old stepped off the boat, Manhattan's teeming garment district swiftly swallowed him up. It took him seven years to get as far as art school. Since then he has gone all the way from pure abstractionism to meticulous realism (and most of the way back again). His theory: "Each painting should stand by itself, not only as to subject matter but also technically. Variety is the basis of all living force."

Today Kantor is one of the most popular teachers at Manhattan's Cooper Union and also the Art Students League. What baffles his students is that, unlike their own, Kantor's perennial experiments are usually successful. "It isn't easy, you know," explains Artist Kantor shyly. "Painting is rather like having a love affair."

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