Negative Realist

Crazily crowded openings, with enthusiasts jammed straight up against the pictures they came to view, are a regular feature of the booming Manhattan art season. But few had seen the like of Robert Beverly Hale's opening at Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery last week. His show began selling out* before the first Scotch spilled, remained a pandemonium long after the caterer's bar had closed. It was his first one-man show in Manhattan; were it his last, he would have achieved a lasting fame. The artist, a stooped and apparently quizzical Yankee aristocrat, 59 luxurious years old, was so moved that he invited sundry friends to dinner. More than half a hundred accepted on the spot.

Phenomenal Rise. Born on the sunny, frosty side of Boston's Beacon Hill, Hale grew up in Manhattan, studied at Columbia, the Sorbonne and Manhattan's Art Students League. "I really learned drawing at the League," he says gently, smiling from the corner of his Raymond Massey mouth. "You learn something when you are with it more than eight hours a day." Hale went on to become a drawing instructor at the League and elsewhere, seemed destined for genteel, professorial obscurity until 1949, when the late Metropolitan Museum director, Francis Henry Taylor, tapped him for curator of contemporary American art. Taylor was under heavy fire for having allowed the Met's purchases of modern American painting to lapse. He gave Hale his wrinkled, balding, well-groomed head, and Hale began buying right and left.

Spreading his impeccable tails, Hale has ridden the art boom skyhigh. "If something happens in San Francisco," he murmurs confidently, "it will usually cross my desk within a week. I know all the able artists who can give valuable opinions on new art. The rise in pictures I have bought is phenomenal; the market has moved up with me, you know?"*

Sensitivity & Boldness. Hale believes that "good painting consists of good color, good composition and good drawing.

Good drawing has declined tremendously in recent years, because if anyone draws well he is attacked as being sentimental or anecdotal. The result is that many teachers cannot draw well and neither can their pupils. Therefore they are doomed to create what I call geometrical or biological abstractions--Scotch plaid or turkey-dinner paintings." Hale's own drawings look rather like Rorschach tests that the doctor never thought of. Using India ink and a very long brush, Hale sketches in the shadows of ideas. These blotlike shadows have sensitivity and boldness--a happy combination--but what do they signify? Plenty, he says: "In some cases I think I have achieved negative realism. In a few years I think it will be possible to communicate with life on other planets around the sun. I suspect we will learn more about negative realism from the beings on other planets. Negative realism is in the subconscious. New artists must break a hole in the subconscious and go fishing there."

*Eleven drawings at $240 to $300; one painting at $1,000.

*Item: a large, flaking Jackson Pollock abstraction, for which Hale paid a reputed $32,000 in 1957, recently brought a $75,000 offer from the dealer who sold it, might bring $100,000 in the open market.

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