The State of Painting

Artists and critics alike have long accused Manhattan's mighty Metropolitan Museum of slighting contemporary U.S. art. This week the Met atoned for its former coolness with a show that surveyed the field exhaustively, and exhaustingly as well. No less than 6,248 painters had submitted works for the exhibition. To get the widest possible spread of work and judgment, the Met had appointed regional juries in Dallas, Santa Barbara, Richmond, Chicago and Manhattan. The regional juries rejected all but 761; then a national jury cut the total down to 307--more than enough to constitute a full report on the state of the nation's art.

Warm Milk. Room One contained four paintings for which the Met had awarded $8,500 in prizes. The awards were all safe as warm milk; granted to men who had won many prizes before, they ran the gamut from watered-down abstractionism to souped-up realism. Basket Bouquet, an impeccable and wholly uninspiring arrangement of lilac smudges by Cape Cod Abstractionist Karl Knaths, took first prize. It looked rather like a flat but tasteful Victorian sampler, translated into the smeary medium of oils. California's Rico Lebrun came in second with Centurion's Horse, a chalky, Picassoid nag, understandably hanging its head in a canvas as dark and narrow as a hall closet.

Third prize went to Manhattan's Yasuo Kuniyoshi, whose works sometimes have the taste and balance of good Oriental art. His shrill, finicky Fish Kite did not. Joseph Hirsch's fourth-prizewinning view of Nine Men in a men's-room mirror was as skillfully done as anything in the show, and as dour. Hirsch had caught the cold light reflected from glass and white tiling, dramatically illuminated the begrimed and weary workmen cleaning up in its glare.

The Met-appointed juries were on the conservative side, a fact which had led 28 advance-guard abstractionists to boycott the show (TIME, June 5). Possibly to rebut the allegation that they were just old fuddy-duddies, the jurors toppled over backward, chose whole roomfuls of alfalfa-dry, determinedly subjectless and mostly meritless efforts by the Academy of the Left. The leavening in their dull, predictable company was provided by a few comparatively young and little-known painters with a sense of self. Honolulu's Ben Norris translated mountains into a jagged, energetic shorthand that almost soared. Boston's Lawrence Kupferman reduced a tide-pool to a rich swirling pattern that looked like yellow marble.

Warm Ashes. If the abstractionists were mostly dry, the more traditional painters were soggy. Even the much-admired ones often succeeded by mere competence. Henry Koerner's blend of banality and obscurity, Fire on the Beach, was an ashen canvas warmed by brilliant drawing alone. John Koch's The Monument was curious in content and cottony in color, but it had a complexity and depth of composition that few moderns could bring off. Isabel Bishop's Nude Bending (one of the show's few nudes) was so dimly painted it looked like a fading wraith, but its every line and highlight was placed precisely right.

Some of the nation's best artists, among them Max Weber, Georgia O'Keeffe, Franklin Watkins and Alexander Brook, were not in the show at all. Others were represented badly. Edward Hopper, who finds it almost impossible to paint a dull picture, contributed an old one instead. His Night Conference, like Hirsch's Nine Men, was a standout at last year's Carnegie exhibition and also at the Met. Andrew Wyeth, generally the realest of the young realists, sent a vapid study of a curiously costumed boy on a bicycle adorned with a red, white & blue racoon tail. He called it Young America. Philip Evergood, who is as much concerned with social propaganda as he is with exercising his prodigious talent, showed a grim glance at Harlem entitled Sunny Side of the Street. It was cluttered as all get-out, but as usual with Evergood, every detail was drawn with character and spirit.

Warm Embrace. The only topnotch painter shown at peak performance was Buffalo's Charles Burchfield, who had somehow managed to slip a watercolor into an exhibition of oils. His Dark Ravine was menacing as an abyss by Fuseli, but richer, and lacking all pretension.

In staging its survey, the Met had honored U.S. painting with a warm and far-too-inclusive embrace. Like the Pepsi-Cola roundups of yesteryear, which were similarly selected, it proved only the obvious point that the U.S. boasts a score of brilliant painters and a mass of mediocre ones. This conclusion was not at all depressing--because it holds true for every nation and for every field of art--but the show was.

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