Here: Now

The 16 paintings on the next eight pages of this issue of TIME are part of a collection of 102 that perform a rare service. They strikingly catch a moment in the development of U.S. art--and the moment they catch is now. Only nine of the 102 were painted before 1959; all but one of the artists represented are living. Most of the names in the "dream list"--from Adler to Zerbe--are to be found in the catalogues of the best art museums in the U.S.

Not a temporary roundup of pictures borrowed for a single showing, "Art: USA: Now" is the collection bought last spring by waxmakers S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. This month the firm will launch the $750,000 show on what promises to be one of the longest and farthest-flung tours in the history of painting. Says Company Chairman Herbert F. Johnson: "Our interest in this project might be described as a sort of act of faith in American art." American Express. After its opening at the Milwaukee Art Center on Sept. 21, the show will make a second debut in Vienna in January. The proposed itinerary from then on reads like something out of an American Express folder: Belgrade, Athens, Rome, Monaco, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, London, Dublin, Paris, Munich. Overseas booking agent for the show will be the U.S. Information Agency,* chosen because some European museums insist on operating exclusively on the government level.

After 18 months in Europe, the show will come home and set out on a tour of the U.S. that will last indefinitely; already there have been 132 requests for it from U.S. museums.

Dream Commission. The collection was chosen by Manhattan Art Dealer Lee Nordness, who was given his commission after delivering a lecture at the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wis., last winter. Acting as cautiously as if he were setting out to steal the Mono, Lisa, Nordness began to round up the paintings, and being a dealer himself was able to get them for his "anonymous client'' at realistic prices.

The most costly item in the collection is Andrew Wyeth's The Scarecrow, which Nordness got at the bargain price of $50,000. Wyeth, who paints only two pictures a year, currently commands twice that figure, and his 1962 output had already been spoken for. By a lucky break, the 1947 Scarecrow turned up at a dealer.

Says Nordness: "Wyeth is painting today just as he did then; so The Scarecrow is an honest representation of his present style. I let this criterion be my guide on all the pre-1959 paintings by other artists I bought." New Comprehensibility. What kind of impact will "Art: USA: Now" have in Europe? The best prediction can be made by comparing the new show to a big collection called "The New American Painting" which toured Europe in 1958 under the sponsorship of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By then, the U.S. abstract-expressionist movement of the '40s had vastly influenced European painters, and today Jackson Pollocks are in many of the well-known collections abroad. Nonetheless, the show's uncompromising abstractions left all but Europe's most sophisticated critics baffled.

"Art: USA: Now" will instantly rate higher in comprehensibility. At least two-thirds of the paintings are representational--ranging from abstractions with the merest suggestion of an image, through the surrealistic, to outright realism. Splash, drip and blot have given way to a new craftsmanship. Says Metropolitan Museum of Art Director James Rorimer: "I was in Europe recently, and everywhere--particularly behind the Iron Curtain--people are eager to see the work of our contemporary painters, to compare it with what their artists are doing today. I think it is terribly important that we show them." Younger Painters. Entrepreneur Nordness believes that U.S. artists will begin to get a bigger slice of the international art market--and inflated U.S. prices will begin to level off as more realistic appraisals emerge from competition with European contemporary painters. Many of the artists represented are "old masters" of modern art--Willem de Kooning, Walter Stuempfig, Hans Hoffman, Morris Graves, Loren Mclver, Stuart Davis, Charles Burchfield. Edward Hopper, Jack Levine, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mark Tobey, William Thon, Ben Shahn, Charles Shee-ler--but Nordness has wisely selected work by a substantial number of younger or lesser-known painters to forecast the future of U.S. painting.

Paul Wonner is a San Francisco painter who has recently been part of a movement in the return to a figurative style known as "Bay Area Painting." Wonner's feeling for pigment is obvious in his Bedroom; the heavy surfaces are built up by slabs of color, and the overall blueness of the scene is startlingly interrupted by the apple-green chair seat, a focus to which the eye wanders repeatedly.

John Wilde (pronounced Will-da) is a native Midwesterner with an extravagant taste for fantasy. A master technician, his paintings are eyelash-perfect; floating figures and cavorting animals reflect his absorption with nature. But it is the nature of the museum showcase--stuffed, hanging on invisible wires, lovingly lit, carefully dusted each morning.

George Tooker is another painter of the "sharp focus" school, but Tooker's realism is the realism of mystery. His canvases are peopled with shuffling figures who make their way through a world of symbolism; they stare, not pleadingly at the viewer but rather defiantly, as if impatient at being interrupted at their arcane business. Others are totally lost in a world they scarcely see. Tooker's technique is almost microscopic in its carefulness; many of his themes are classical, with a twist of deadly nightshade. The lighting in a Tooker painting seems to filter down from baleful fluorescent tubes, sapping color--even life--from the figures who move through their mystic charades below.

The Patron's Role. Though dozens of leading U.S. corporations are now playing the role of patron of the arts, their art collections are usually used for commercial purposes--in advertising, to decorate their offices and lobbies. But Herbert F.

Johnson disclaims such intent, is limiting the exhibition of "Art: USA: Now" to public museums, where Johnson sponsorship will be played down. If his purpose has been to give American painting a richer future and a handsome present, while at the same time eloquently preserving the dignity of the artists involved, he seems to have succeeded.

* USIA's experience as art entrepreneur has not always been happy: its 1956 European show was canceled by Government order on the ground that ten of the artists represented had Red-tinged palettes. Since the U.S. viewpoint on such matters has matured apace with art tastes, it is unlikely that this objection will arise again.

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