Space Impelled

All along Manhattan's art-vending 57th Street last week, abstraction reared its cipher head. Most of its exhibiting practitioners were under 50, but none of them happened to be children, no matter what their work seemed to indicate. Among the standouts:

P: Barnett Newman, 45, was a man of few lines--one, or at the most two, to a picture. The lines ran straight up & down, bisecting huge canvases that were painted one bright color apiece. "My search," said Newman with massive dignity, "is for a picture that is simple and self-evident. What is there is there." His ultimate purpose, Newman added, was "to make the unknowable manifest." This was not to be confused with the unknown, which held no interest for him.

P: Fritz Bultman, 30, confined himself largely to black, white and grey arrangements of what looked like moldy bones. According to the catalogue foreword, his pictures were not really abstract: "Rather they are religious, or moral, bereft of realistic pictorial detail for the same reason philosophy is shorn of particular verbal description of the life whose meaning it explores."

P: Lee Mullican, 30, got his art training in the Army, mapping air views of Pacific islands. His paintings did not offend the eye, they hurt it, being composed of innumerable shreds of intolerably bright conflicting colors. Unlike the more austere abstractionists, he gave his pictures titles, but such tags as He-Rain and Happily the Chiefs Regard You would be lost on gallerygoers who were not Navajo Indians.

P: William Baziotes, 38, used titles too. His Mummy, a formless fungus floating in green scum, was rich and strange enough to stick in the mind's eye--whether one wanted it there or not. Baziotes' confections of molasses-sweet color and protoplasmic shapes are never planned in advance. "Each painting," he once explained, "comes about in a different way. Some are started with a few touches of color, others with lines. Sometimes nothing happens. I have to give up. But when the urge comes I work swiftly. When I am finished, the painting means something to me."

P: George McNeil, 40, starts with a still life "as a point of departure. Then almost immediately I see through the object into movements of form and color which create space. I call my paintings 'Space Impelled.' " Clearly McNeil's impulse was to churn space up into something gooey and gay. It took tubefuls of loud color, and a good deal Of single-minded thrashing and splashing, but he managed it.

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