Go West, Young Men

Montparnasse's smoky cafes are not noted for peace & quiet, but the meeting last February was something special, even for artists in Paris. Crowded onto a cafe terrace were 150 young American painters working abroad, and their friends and hangers-on, everyone bellowing loudly at the injustice of it all. The uproar was over an announcement that a big group show by 124 American artists, 340 paintings in all, had just been canceled. At the last minute, a three-man French jury had decided that "there were not enough works of outstanding merit."

Last week France's U.S. colony finally got its group show, but in somewhat abbreviated form. A committee of artists had talked a new, five-man jury into choosing 35 of the best paintings by 31 artists to hang in a Left Bank gallery. Most of them were total abstractions and as standard as soap flakes. They bore such labels as Morning Incense and Fragments of Night-Music, showed dizzying thickets of orange and green paint, wild compositions in blue, grey, black & white, twisted black lines on a glowing red background. Only two showed much originality: an eerie pale green and blue phantasy called Flight, by Artist Ruth Franken. a naturalized U.S. citizen born, in Prague, and a design in black, white and grey titled Testament 1952, by 35-year-old Lawrence Calcagno of San Francisco.

Paris critics who saw the exhibit tended to agree with the first three judges. Their verdict: the Americans were trying too hard to paint like Europeans; most of them would have done better to stay home, concentrate on the local scene, and develop a style of their own. But the artists were undaunted. The 93 whose works were rejected again by the second jury held another protest meeting as noisy as the first, decided to put on their own "Sour Grapes Show" in a cafe.

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