Breakthroughs

Modern painters are apt to spend unconscionable hours in the market place, just to see what is brewing in other ivory towers. "Anything new?" they cry, and under their breaths many add: "Whatever it is, I'll run right back to my studio and try it."

Manhattan's art market last week offered little food to such hungry-eyed faddists. Instead, the standout shows pointed up the advantage of hewing to a straight and narrow path. Two young but conservative U.S. painters, Andrew Wyeth and Jack Levine, were staging exhibitions bound to enhance their already strong reputations. They had succeeded not by any violent shift of style but by pressing along their old ways to new heights.

ANDREW WYETH was trained by his artist father, N. C. Wyeth, whose illustrations for The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island and The Boy's King Arthur entranced generations of children. Less romantic in feeling than his father, young Andy mastered a calm, tidy way of painting landscapes. At 20 he had his first Manhattan show, which sold out.

Had he been as content with his own talent as the public was, Wyeth might have remained a minor painter. But he kept expanding his capacity to picture things with ever-increasing clarity. Pennsylvania fields and farmers, Maine inlets and fishermen, old houses and musty rooms were his favorite subjects. As the clarity of his work increased, the sentimental side of Wyeth's subject matter diminished in importance. Last winter, at 35; Wyeth sat down to paint a practically empty picture. It became the hit of his exhibition at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries last week.

Seen across a room, the picture looked rather like an abstraction. Somber in color, it had a surging quality as unsettling as any work by such abstract expressionists as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. A closer look justified the big tempera's title--Field Gate. In the foreground were two rickety gateposts, from which a faintly discernible path looped up and away over a vast, snow-swept hillside rising to an eerily shifting, storm-filled sky. Meticulously building this wide, wild scene, grass blade by grass blade, Wyeth suggested the looming forces of nature in an impassioned portrait of Earth and Winter.

JACK LEVINE was born in the slums of Boston's South End, and raised in a school of art that came to be known as "proletarian." A tightlipped, hatchet-faced youth, Levine painted lividly angry pictures of bloated capitalists and brutal cops. As an honor student of the proletarian school, he rode especially high in his 20s. Drafted in World War II, Levine found on his return that his kind of painting had fallen out of fashion: the postwar generation of painters was going almost wholly abstract.

Levine went right on wagging and jabbing his brush at social ills. Meanwhile, he made himself a master of expressionist techniques, mingling hot and cold colors as delightfully as Kokoschka, and squeezing and stretching figures as boldly as Soutine. Last year he began work on a huge canvas of a gangster funeral, which was frankly meant to spotlight political corruption of the big cities. Among the mourners he put "two widows, one very, very shapely," and "the chief of police, come to pay his last respects--a face at once porcine and acute."

Finished last June, the painting was the core of an exhibition at Manhattan's Alan Gallery last week. Levine had crammed it with hatpin-sharp caricatures, all bathed in a rich and suitably waxen light. His nervous, flickering brushwork brought every inch of the canvas to life, and created an illusion of space filled not only with figures but with air, odors and heavy thoughts. Levine's message to his fellow man was no longer propagandistic, but moral. Gangster Funeral may, like Hogarth's Gin Lane and Lautrec's Elles, live far beyond the age that inspired it.

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