Question & Answers

But what does it really mean?

Whispered or asked in a clear unabashed voice, no question is heard more often in a modern art gallery. The answers--whether supplied by highbrow critics, crusty crusaders, or well-meaning friends of the artist--are rarely very conclusive. This week, one Manhattan gallery tried the sensible experiment of letting the artists speak for themselves. It put on a group show of 23 U.S. painters (including some of the best) and invited each of them to contribute 75 words of explanation for the exhibition catalogue.

The abstractionists turned out to be abstract in words as well as in paint. The more conservative painters, having less to account for, took a comfortably conservative tone. The best of the bunch, by & large, said the least. Some highlights:

John Marin, 76-year-old dean of U.S. watercolorists, opened his paragraph bravely enough, but his description dwindled off into a thicket of punctuation dashes. "The good picture-- No one wonders at more than the one who created it. Made--with an inborn instinct,--in which time begets an awareness --and these periods of awareness are-- The--red letter--days in the Creator's life."

Ralston Crawford wrote that his abstraction of a Hawaiian fishing port, Kewalo, showing two or three slices of plane geometry and a porthole, simply reflected his "interest in finding and expressing ... a bit of order." He seemed to be on safe enough ground there.

P:Jacob Lawrence, a Negro expressionist, wrote that the most important thing about art to him was not expression at all, but observation. "My long-term approach is an effort to develop the insight and personal philosophy I bring to my observation. I tried to do this in The Wedding (see cut)."

P:Conservative Bernard Karfiol argued that "a painting should be seen through the innate feeling eye rather than the literary scientific mind . . . For me, Nature in all its elements provides the essentials."

He went on to say that his landscape with girls in bathing suits had been "motivated by a mood of joyfulness." P:Ben Shahn's 73 words were as incisive as his art: "I'll say this much: that art is my particular form of speech, and what ever I feel about men who sing and play guitars, I've said in the present picture.

I feel myself in the desperate position of one who, having just presented a long, painstaking, carefully worked out harangue on a subject dear to his heart, is confronted with the request: 'Will you now give us seventy-five words on what you've just said?' " P: Georgia O'Keeffe spent only sev en well-chosen words in describing her latest painting -- a starkly splen did, semi-abstract rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge (see cut) : "This is the Brooklyn Bridge to me."

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