TWO CURRENTS

The traditions in American art derive almost entirely from Europe. Yet, over the years, painting in America has compiled its own distinguished history; today its course rivals that of any European country except France.

There, four old men--Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Rouault--uphold standards they set early in the century. In the U.S., a handful of comparatively young men are setting new standards very different from those of Paris.

With a look at two such contemporaries, representing two of the strongest currents in U.S. painting today, TIME this week begins a three-part retrospective of American painting, as seen in collections now on exhibition in the U.S.

Henry Koerner came to the U.S. 16 years ago, a refugee from the Nazi pogroms in his native Vienna. He designed propaganda posters for the OWI and OSS during World War II, soon afterwards earned his present reputation as one of the nation's most thoughtful and skillful painters. His first fame rested on pictures just this side of surrealism: a barber treating a bearded customer to a violin concert, children sledding on tailors' dummies, a pregnant girl trapped in a jungle gym. What gave weight to their gloomy wit was the exactitude of Koerner's observation and the sharpness of his execution.

Today, at 38, Koerner has abandoned symbolism for a fanatically objective approach to everyday subjects. His new paintings, on view at Manhattan's Midtown Galleries this week, struck at least one critic as coming "perilously close to academicism." But Paul Cezanne, who was no academician, would have approved Koerner's Mother and Child (opposite) for its delicate interplay of geometric planes. The master might even have envied its draftsmanship. The plain young mother and her beefy, carrot-topped boy are treated as coolly as a still life, yet his energy and her weariness are perfectly conveyed.

Hyman Bloom is as poetic as Koerner is deliberately prosaic; he seems to echo the horror-logged, death-haunted work of Edgar Allan Poe. Bloom's Slaughtered Animal (overleaf), part of a retrospective exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, led one dowager to complain that "When I want raw meat, I'll send my chauffeur to the butcher."

Like Koerner, Bloom is Jewish and European-born. Brought to the U.S. from Lithuania by his shoemaker father, he was raised humbly in Boston. Bloom was introduced to painting in a settlement house, continued it on the WPA and gained fame in the early '40s. His first important canvases showed the influence of the European expressionists Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoshka. He applied their color-by-the-gob technique to molten-seeming canvases of rabbis, chandeliers, brides, Christmas trees, buried treasure and, finally, corpses. At 40, Bloom exercises a control of his medium as elaborate, and theatrical, as Caravaggio's. His steady gain in dexterity is offset by a restriction of range: for a full decade now, Bloom has concentrated on dead flesh, often disemboweled and usually human.

The fact that his corpses are not always well received bewilders Bloom. "I really thought people would be delighted," he says with an air of complete surprise. "It seems to me that i/ you have any conviction of immortality you can look at such a subject as objectively as at anything else. The body is very beautiful, and its insides are just as beautiful as the outside."

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