TASTEMAKERS' CHOICE

IN the last weeks of spring museum men descend in droves on Manhattan to tour the galleries, see what their colleagues are buying and pick up the latest gossip before the summer doldrums set in. To help them out, Manhattan galleries this week are busy staging their own "season survey" and "new discoveries" shows. In addition, the Modern Museum is showing its "Twelve Americans" of the year,* and two galleries are displaying the current choices and future bets of 19 museum directors and curators. The whole lavish display points up a new trend in the market place of modern art: since the contemporary field is too big to be financed by a handful of rich art connoisseurs and few critical taste-setters are influential enough even to flutter a price tag, the task of spotting promising newcomers and springboarding them to national prominence is increasingly falling to the nation's museum directors.

One artist who has survived this gauntlet and is now coming into his own is Princeton-educated William Kienbusch, 42, now showing at Manhattan's Kraushaar Galleries. The surest sign of his arrival: the fact that U.S. museums now own 18 of his colorful semi-abstract paintings of the Maine coast, seven of them purchased in the last year alone.

Kienbusch's artistic urgings began early. "When I was a kid and blew out the candles on the birthday cake." he recalls, "I always made the same wish--to be an artist." Achieving that wish turned out to be a long haul that took him to the Art Students' League, abroad for a year's painting in Paris, and home again to work with Muralist Anton Refregier and Abstractionist Stuart Davis. Then a summer on Deer Island, off the Maine coast, gave Kienbusch his clue to what he liked to paint best: "The world of many things I love--Maine islands, trees, the sea, fences, gong buoys, churches, roses, mountains."

Essentially a landscape painter, Kienbusch finds that reworking nature and translating it into his own terms is the only way to get at its inner meaning and intensity. Says he: "I betray nature if I copy." In the Houston Museum of Fine Arts' Across Penobscot Bay (opposite) he shows "what it feels like on a beautiful day to look from an island across the bay. What interested me was that the space of the trees in the foreground seems to embrace the space of the bay." The starting point for The Weir and the Island, now owned by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, was the view Kienbusch got of a weir made of burnt spruce, set in a tideway. "The spruce boughs were rust-colored," he recalls. "They stood up out of the water like wild orange branches in a blue field. The three bars represent low tide, and then the island. It's kind of a wild picture."

*The twelve: Ernest Briggs, James Brooks, Sam Francis, Fritz Glanner, Philip Guston, Raoul Hague, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Jose de Rivera. Larry Rivers.

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