A Week at the Beach

Most modern artists, like frontier farmers, think of nature as a wilderness to be tamed and used. They hack out their own fields, grow whatever they please (sometimes it looks as though the weeds had got the better of them). But 62-year-old Leon Kroll is one modern who has never strayed far from the well-tilled plantations of traditional art. His nudes, portraits and landscapes are smooth, serene, invariably recognizable.

Kroll's unobtrusive interpretations of nature have been branded slick, vacant and posey by the fiercer critics, but they were good enough to win 23 prizes in the past 34 years (including a Carnegie International first) and to hang in most of the top U.S. museums. They please almost anyone who likes a picture to look like a picture of something. Last week in Manhattan Kroll was staging his first one-man show in twelve years. Until the war, he had spent a lot of his time doing murals; since then he has been "painting pictures for my own amazement."

The landscapes in the show were all souvenirs of Kroll's summers spent with his wife and daughter at Folly Cove on Cape Ann, Mass. Compared with the streaming color of sea-&-sun worshipers like Bonnard (see MILESTONES), Kroll's paintings had a bland formality that was just short of frozen, but they did evoke in many brisk Manhattanites the languid pleasures of a week at the beach. His Naiad (see cut) was painted with a vacationing college girl as a model.

Kroll, who once studied in Paris, is not so academic as to copy each Cape Ann painting complete from a scene in nature. "I just combine different things that have the character of the cape," he explains.

"My pictures are based on abstract design. All the elements are worked in and they are not photographic representations. You see, I knew all those fellows in France but I don't see any sense in being a little Matisse or Picasso."

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