No Hiding Place

Ever since the "Ashcan" painters of the early igoos went looking for Beauty in alleys and gutters, U.S. artists have prided themselves on smoking the lady out of the most unexpected hiding places. Last week in a Manhattan gallery, Painter James Fosburgh smoked her out again. He had discovered her in a dirty clothes hamper, a rumpled pillow, a tavern jukebox. "Anything can be beautiful if you bother to see its beauty," says Fosburgh. "Even a hamper can be a vision of the world." He makes a handsome still life from a pair of discarded work gloves or a coffee cup, a romantic landscape from the bleak hangars and dingy flats of La Guardia Airport seen across turgid Flushing Bay.

Fosburgh is a late starter: he is having his first one-man show at 41. After musing through galleries and lecturing for four years at Manhattan's Frick Museum on everything from Chinese ceramics to Boucher, he finally decided to turn painter. Wartime service as an Army glider pilot held him up for five years. Then he spent another year experimenting with blobs and squiggles: "I didn't know what I was doing, and finally I decided I wasn't going to find out, so I chucked the whole lot into the fireplace."

He decided to model himself on Rembrandt, Goya, Chardin and U.S. Painter Thomas Eakins ("one of the greatest portraitists of all time"): "It was a matter of looking and looking and then working and working." The small public that buys pictures approved the results: his Manhattan show was a near sellout.

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