From Mountain Mists

Overshadowed by such yeasty oldsters as Picasso, Matisse and Braque, the younger generation of French artists has had a hard time getting itself noticed. But last week Paris gallerygoers got a look at the work of 45-year-old Pierre Tal-Coat (rhymes with kum-quat), who thinks he has found the way. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were trying to attract attention by loud colors, shocking subjects and explosive forms, he had retreated from noisy, "spaceless" Paris to the cool mountain forests of Provence, and to misty abstractions of rocks, trees and streams.

The son of a Breton fisherman, Pierre Tal-Coat has been a long time getting-out from under the older generation's thumb. Beginning his career in his teens, he taught himself by studying the styles of the artists he admired most. As he wandered from Brittany to Paris to Provence and back again, he worked his way through the rough-stroked techniques of the expressionists to the slick, brashly colored abstractions of Picasso.

Finally, after the war, he settled down in the Cezanne country near Aix. There, said Tal-Coat, he found himself at last, and "found the world in the shade of the ever-changing mountain mists of la Sainte Victoire." Taking to the woods, he studied "the tangled roots of the pine trees . . . the silence of the rock." Later in his studio he tried to catch the forest's "union of space and movement" on canvases which he covered with patchy, off-white backgrounds, spots of green, grey, mauve and brown.

His 25 forest abstractions which hung in Paris' small Galerie de France last week had all the space that anyone could ask for. Spare and faintly colored, they resembled at their best delicate Chinese landscapes; at worst, they looked as though Tal-Coat had been cleaning some not-very-dirty brushes on his canvas.

Parisian critics agreed that Tal-Coat was indeed an artist "away from the current of his epoch." Instead of sophisticated posturings, said one, there was "an indication of meditation, of a naive drunkenness." But his feverish search for ever-increasing simplicity could also lead into a blind alley. Presumably, commented Opera, "Tal-Coat has reached the end of his evolution because unless he is prepared to exhibit blank canvases to his breathless public, what else can he do?"

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