Signs of Spring

For 13 years, Manhattan's Whitney Museum has greeted spring with a big show of contemporary U.S. sculpture, watercolors and drawings. Last week's exhibition was one of the best in the show's history. As usual, it contained a weedy jungle of mediocre and ostentatious works, and nothing that could be called "great." But down among the weeds were many fresh, playful sprouts.

None of the younger men's watercolors could match those exhibited by oldtimers Charles Burchfield and John Marin, but there were a few that came close. Dong Kingman's rich, elaborate House Boat, an artful jumble of calligraphs set in perspective, was lively and bright as a flag-draped avenue on a windy day. Lawrence Kupferman's luminous underwater abstraction, Genesis of Growth, had all the minute fascination of a rocky tide pool.

David Fredenthal's Great Fugue was a rhythmic evocation of Conductor Arturo Toscanini in action, and of the music he draws forth. Fredenthal had spent hours in an NBC radio engineer's booth, watching the great man conduct orchestra rehearsals. Toscanini moved too fast to catch in an orthodox sketch, so Fredenthal made multiple-image sketches that recorded a number of recurrent gestures simultaneously. The resulting watercolor bore some relation to Marcel Duchamp's famed Nude Descending a Staircase and some to Gjon Mili's stroboscopic photographs. It had more warmth than either.

In sculpture, warmth is less easily achieved. The Greeks did it consistently, but few moderns care to try. Among the few is Burr Miller, whose marble Genetrix stood out at the Whitney like a breathing woman in a waxworks. Robert Cronbach's bas-relief Woman Drinking was contrastingly weightless; by hollowing out his fat, unhappy figure he had transformed her into an alcoholic cloud.

Most of the sculptures selected by the Whitney were abstract concoctions of spikes, bumps, lumps, bars and bits of string, and most were dreadful. But Robert Howard's slim pear wood Semaphore was there to show how elegant three-dimensional abstractions can be. Peter Lipman-Wulf's Horse and Man looked as if it had been made for fun from the contents of a carpenter's scrap barrel. Despite its casual air it was as tense and tightly constructed as anything in the show.

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