Champagne

"Painting," Marcel Gromaire believes, "is a matter of long research and patient waiting." At 58, the pipe-smoking, professorial Frenchman is suspicious of modern art, thinks it includes too many "new movements." He does most of his work at a massive oak table in a quiet, residential district of southern Paris, making pen sketches for future paintings. For every 50 or so sketches, he does one watercolor. Every few years he produces enough paintings to have a show like last week's at Paris' Louis Carre Gallery.

In view of Gromaire's philosophy, the scant dozen watercolors in the exhibition might have been expected to look labored, but Gromaire's paintings do not turn out that way. His methods result in pictures that are sparkling and easy to take as a glass of champagne.

Gromaire's talent is not on a grand scale; it consists in simplifying the obvious. One of the best paintings on view was nothing more than a head-on view of a Dutch windmill and a couple of fishing boats. Gromaire had reduced his picture-postcard subject to a boldly geometrical pattern of intense colors that fixed, without frippery, the spirit of the scene.

Reviewing the show, the influential Paris weekly, Les Arts, guessed that "A hundred years from now, Gromaire will be considered one of the most representative painters of our period." That was faint praise, yet fair enough. Gromaire's art says little that has not been better expressed by older School-of-Paris artists--among them his two favorites, Bonnard and Matisse. But in a field crammed with slapdash imitations of the masters, Gromaire's paintings have an honest, craftsmanlike, and sometimes compelling ring.

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