WHAT THE MUSEUMS ARE BUYING

ON THE walls of Colorado Springs' Fine Arts Center this week are 58 contemporary American canvases purchased by 47 U.S. museums in the past two years. In one glance visitors could learn what sort of painting most appeals to today's museum directors. The exhibition includes sprinklings of realists and romantics, looking as out of place as women in a poker game. But in total, the show is predominantly abstract.

Explaining their taste, the directors who bought the canvases reproduced on the next two pages threw a good deal of light on the abstractionist trend in acquisitions. The directors' cases:

P:Heart of Norway Spruce, by Theodores Stamos, 33, was acquired by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. Corcoran Director Hermann Williams calls it "a characteristic example of one of the strongest and most vital phases of contemporary expression currently in vogue. Stamos has consistently been one of the chief American exponents of this type of painting. Its range of communication is the emotional reaction on the part of the beholder to its suggestive and subtle arrangements of forms and colors. Thus its appeal is akin to the appeal of Oriental calligraphy."

P:Red and Blue, by John Ferren, 50, was bought by the University of Nebraska Art Galleries for $600. Says Director Norman Geske: "This was an attempt to place ourselves up to date. We felt this was particularly brilliant. Ferren works with a full recognition of the accidental values you can get into a painting. He sometimes drops liquid paint on a canvas; the drops spread by themselves. Red and Blue is pretty much that sort of thing. In general it looks highly accidental, but to those of us who know better it represents a good deal of sensitivity."

P:Horse Mackerel, by Karl Knaths, 64, was given by Department Storeman Morton D. May to the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Assistant Museum Director William Eisendrath calls it "an example of an American artist who is a genius, and who has come under the influence of cubism and expressionism. It is one of the best examples of its type." Says Benefactor May, who paid $1,200 for the canvas in the late '40s; "He [Knaths] abstracts nature, but it is still recognizable. Horse Mackerel is an abstraction of a giant tuna. One who looks carefully will see the form of the tuna, the boom it hangs from, and a portion of the pier. There are dynamic waves in the background--waves of beautiful color."

P:Clear Cut Landscape, by Milton Avery, 63, was acquired by the women's board of the San Francisco Museum of Art for "about $1,500." Grace Morley, the museum director, recommended its purchase because "Avery is a very distinguished colorist, and in the American school color isn't our strong point. The painting is a semi-abstraction of a very subtle kind. In the context of American painting Avery is considered a very important master, and we were anxious to have his point of view, his subtlety, represented."

P:Composition: The Storm, by Balcomb Greene. 52. was bought by Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Director Hermon More says the picture was inspired by 1954's Hurricane Carol, which battered Greene's seaside house at Montauk Point, on the eastern tip of Long Island. "We bought it because it represents a new direction from his previous style, which was more classical, not so emotional. This is based more directly on nature. It's more romantic. This is the expression of emotion in nature. It is a rather significant direction of abstract painting. It looks like nature is creeping in again."

The chances of Stamos. Ferren, Knaths, Avery and Greene all being as important as their supporters claim are dim indeed. Important painters seldom come in big clusters, like grapes. The inevitable shift of art fashions (which have wheeled from "social realism" to "abstract expressionism" in a generation) may well leave some of these withering on the vine. Meanwhile, they make an instructive cross section of what "those of us who know better" like best.

The significance of their abstractions perhaps lies in their lack of doctrinaire push. They have neither the militant geometrizing of Mondrian nor the let-'er-drip violence of Pollock; they do not aim to amaze. Having developed a front thousands of easels wide in America, abstractionism can no longer be called a spearhead movement or even advance-guard. Its products are increasingly milder, more delicate and amorphous. And when such practitioners as Knaths, Avery and Greene flirt openly with nature, their semi-abstractions further blur the lines of what not long ago seemed a battlefield.

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