Inside & Out

Selden Rodman has made a, host of both friends and enemies in Manhattan always impassioned, sometimes shrill art world. What excites both camps is Critic Rodman's controversial habit of asking big questions about art and then offering plain answers in book form. Rodman's The Eye of Man (TIME, Nov. 28, 1955) asked whether artists should not "communicate spiritual truth," and replied with an emphatic yes. Now Rodman is deep in a new book, The Insiders, which asks whether artists should not paint what they feel in a recognizable fashion for all to understand. Again he gives the unfashionable answer: "Yes."

In his New Jersey farmhouse last week, Selden Rodman, 50, showed reporters his own swelling art collection, which ranges from Haitian primitives to an abstraction painted on the spot in 1 min. 40 sec. The collection crams every room of the house, is growing so fast that Rodman recently added a gallery wing where his favorite new "insiders" hang. Chief insiders: Rico Lebrun, Leonard Baskin, James Kearns. Lebrun is typically represented by an agonized nude entitled Crying Machine, Baskin by a recumbent sculpture suggestive of a fire victim, and Kearns by a powerful drawing of children watching an auto accident. The Kearns has Spanish intensity, plus the dark, gritty air of a Pennsylvania mining town. All three artists, Rodman says, "project anguish over the human predicament."

If these are insiders, who are the outsiders and what do they project? Rodman thinks that most abstract artists ride outside and project precious little. "The whole emphasis in art for the past hundred years," he maintains, "has been as much against society as possible. The critics say, 'This is art,' and so the public accepts it. The insider is trying to return to the aim of art in ages past; he is portraying the raw thing--not mere elegance or mere social concepts either. He is totally unconcerned with what kind of figure he cuts in the arena. His qualities are personal, and they come out of suffering. A face is only interesting when it reveals that it has experienced something, that it has been shaped by life and love. So with a painting. If it reveals only a chic, decorative exuberance, or only taste and elegance, its interest will be ephemeral."

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