Herds & Old Mavericks

Since its beginning in 1896, the Carnegie international exhibition of contemporary art has aroused as much irritation as appreciation in its native Pittsburgh. It undertakes to round up what the world's artists are doing at the moment, and artists are notoriously a bit ahead of the public. Last week's Carnegie, with 367 paintings and 127 sculptures, irritated even more than usual--the show proved to be almost wholly devoted to abstract expressionism from 31 countries. Abstractions swept nine out of ten prizes (the tenth was a semi-abstract Henry Moore) and, as the New York Times's Critic Howard Devree dourly noted, every prize "may be called in question." Due for especially earnest questioning was the $3,000 top winner in painting: Antoni Tapies' mysteriously simple grey-black and grey La Pintura (Spanish for painting).

Tapies, brightest young (35) man to come out of Spain since those electric uncles of modern art, Picasso, Dali and Miro, allowed that his picture represented "nothing at all." His pigments were mixed with "something like cement--it's almost like relief work." La Pintura does in fact suggest the Costa Brava's austere spaciousness--rocks, sea and fishing boats.

But few other European entries shared Tapies' individualism; the vast majority looked like imitations of American abstract expression, seemed to indicate that a 'herd of mavericks is more herd than maverick. As developed by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and half a dozen more, notably Jackson Pollock (see above), U.S. abstract expression might be compared to the hamburger and the Coke, which have also taken the world by storm. Hamburgers and Cokes are excellent in their ways, and so is abstract expression--but luckily the nation has other nourishment to offer as well.

That fact was made encouragingly clear last week by another big roundup: the Whitney Museum's annual exhibition of American painting and sculpture in Manhattan. There, too, abstract expressionism ruled by force of numbers. But among the 184 exhibits were a handful of pictures calculated to put the new princes of art fashion on their mettle and to prove that the great traditions of American painting still run broad and deep.

Edward Hopper's Sunlight in a Cafeteria (see color) was strictly old-school-tie abstraction--the tie being to reality. It proved once again that Hopper, 76, keeps as firm a grip on imaginary space as any abstract artist alive, still wrings poetry from its arrangement. Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe and Loren Maclver also scored for the older generation, and Stuart Davis' brassily old-fashioned abstraction, Pochade, was like a joyful bopping of the drums for Dixieland jazz, a great U.S. export of another era. Overall, the Whitney show testified that there is more substance in American art than the wildest skeins of abstract expression have ever suggested.

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