Like Half-Forgotten Dreams

Red stars, meaning "sold," marked all but seven of the 28 paintings and drawings hanging in Manhattan's Terry Dintenfass Gallery last week, but if the young artist who did them was impressed, he seemed determined not to show it. "Measles" was his word for the rash of red stars. When a visitor asked how so many drawings and paintings got sold before the exhibition was a day old, the artist said, "We were peddling them in the streets." Success has not spoiled Sidney Goodman of Philadelphia; it simply makes him uneasy, and hence a trifle flip. At 27, he finds himself one of the most respected and sought-after of the new figure painters.

He began painting seriously in 1956 during his next-to-last year at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. There, he had "tried the abstract thing for a while, but I always had to get back to people." Today, when he thinks of the new craze for pop art, he becomes "furious. When an artist paints a Campbell's Soup can, he may be saying something valid, but he cuts himself out as an artist. He is no better than the can." Goodman's own idols have always been Velasquez, Vermeer, Goya--and Rembrandt: "He paints a head and it looks right through you."

When Goodman talks about one of his drawings or paintings, he resembles a man trying to reconstruct a half-forgotten dream. Just as a dream is triggered by some incident of the day, a Goodman painting may stem from the most humdrum of sights, which he transforms into an image that seems to have endless ramifications and is always in part a mystery. Once Goodman noticed two people sunning themselves on the deck of a ship; these became two eerie figures in ghostly robes lying in a landscape that appears to have no beginning and no end, and what is commonplace thus takes on the aura of being cosmic.

A schoolroom in which a lone model happened to be seated became in Goodman's mind an overwhelming architectural space with a tiny, shredded figure set in what he has titled A Bit of Hell. The sight of a garment wrapped around someone's neck resulted in a drawing called Two Men; the figures look something like sphinxes wrapped in shrouds--ordinary human beings, in other words, who manage to suggest both the death of individuals and the long history of the race. When Goodman draws a woman running, she becomes a symbol of panic; the vision of one man comforting another in some great grief is, in part, a dramatic blur, as if the two figures were melted together in a moment of common humanity.

In one of his most moving works, Goodman painted four fear-ridden figures staring out of the canvas, a vast landscape spread out behind them and a storm gathering above, all pictured in strong, somber greens and browns. What are they looking at--the end of the world? Goodman calls this painting simply The View--and, as in almost all of his work, the impact grows as the mystery deepens.

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