Liquid Form

In Paris, which jealously defends its own conviction that it is still the world's greatest art center, art critics rarely feel compelled to write high praise for an American. But American Action Painter Paul Jenkins, 37, has been winning applause for four years, and when his current show opened at the Galerie Karl Flinker, the critics found in it "surprising presence and purity,'' "deeply felt poetry," "moving forms."

True enough, the work was a bit difficult to describe; in an introduction to the show's catalogue. Novelist James Jones expressed his own frustration with his artist friend. "We've talked for hours, and sometimes I wonder what the hell he is talking about. But we still yell at each other and try to get across." To a growing following, especially in Europe, Paul Jenkins has been getting across very well indeed.

Without Encouragement. Jenkins comes from Kansas City, Mo., and doughtily insists that being born there "had as much mystery and adventure for me as being born in some temple city in India." As a boy, he was a constant visitor to the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, and on a weekend job with a master moldmaker at a ceramics factory he got his first observation of a man's "timing and tactile sense with a difficult medium." When Frank Lloyd Wright blew into town on a commission to build a church, Jenkins met him and grandly announced that he was going to be an artist. "He asked me," Jenkins recalls, "if I had ever thought of agriculture." At 17, Jenkins tried to draw some sage advice from Painter Thomas Hart Benton. "Mr. Benton asked me how old I was, and then suggested I come back when I was 21."

In 1948 he enrolled at Manhattan's Art Students League and began studying under Morris Kantor and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. but after four years he still had not found himself. "Even then. I was seeking what Rimbaud seemed to have found: 'New forms that the inventions of the unknown demand.' " So. in 1953. he settled in Paris in a large studio on the Left Bank. There, his present abstract-expressionist style of painting began to emerge.

Without a Brush. He almost never uses a brush. He dribbles paint onto a loose, unstretched canvas, swooshes it around, sometimes "kneads and hauls on the canvas as if it were sail." The triumph is that, even when dry, his canvases manage to look fluid. The colors float into view as if they had been poured like cream into iced coffee and for a moment were suspended. They merge or resist one another, but they are never smeared. To some of Jenkins' abstractionist colleagues they seem a bit too slick, but no one denies their flowing grace.

Jenkins calls himself an "abstract phenomenist." When he has finished four or five paintings. "I have conversations with them, and they tell me what they want to be called--like Phenomena Outside Leap or Phenomena Curving Out or Phenomena Flint Lock." As James Jones said, it is sometimes difficult to know what the hell he is talking about. But his liquid abstractions can speak for themselves.

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