Tomorrow's Artists

What will U.S. art be like, say ten years hence? Last week the small but influential Addison Gallery at Andover, Mass, was supplying an answer of a sort.

On the theory that "the artists of tomorrow are the art students of today," Gallery Director Bartlett Hayes Jr. had gathered 113 prize student pictures from 25 of the country's best art schools. Knowing the assembly-line dreariness of most U.S. art education (which grinds out armies of would-be painters each year), Hayes himself had been surprised by the result--a show that was technically expert, sparkling with real talent and livelier than most on Manhattan's art-merchandising 57th Street.

A student to watch was the Boston Mu seum School's Arthur Polonsky, whose sunlit Boy at the Fence succeeded in being touching without a hint of sentimentality. William Burden Jr., of Indianapolis' John Herron Institute, sent a finely patterned, authoritatively painted study of three bicycling kids. A Portrait o/Roslyn, by the. Pennsylvania Academy's Katherine Grove, showed just how finished student work can be, and the Rhode Island School of Design's Herbert Fink contributed a boy-iff-motion that few professionals would have dared tackle (see cuts).

The budding modems were equally impressive. An abstraction that looked like a diagram of ballet positions for a dancing telephone, by Black Mountain's Ruth Asawa, was the. exhibition's high point in originality. Another girl student--Helen Kae Carter of Iowa State--sent a successfully elaborate still life of kitchen utensils hanging in midair; it was the happily screwball kind of experiment that professionals, with livings to make, seldom get around to. Philip Ciotti of the Carnegie Institute had explored the thin world between abstraction and reality to produce his weird, orange Newspaper Office (see cut). The result was less photographic than Charles Sheeler's clean-scrubbed in dustrial studies, and more interesting than most out-and-out abstractions.

Pleased as he was with the show, Direc tor Hayes thought it could have been improved on if only the schools were better.

"The ideal training," he says, "would combine the kind of technical skill you learn at the Boston Museum School [how to paint what you see] with the more ab stract approach [painting as a language of its own] that Black Mountain provides.

And on top of that there should be courses having nothing to do with art, because to develop a fine artist you have to teach the whole man." Whether or not they had received the best possible school training, it was a fair bet that some of the exhibiting students would be heard from, adding to the vari ety and perhaps heightening the quality of U.S. art.

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