Second-Generation Abstraction

Although it makes them writhe, they are called "hard edge" painters. Among artists of the New York school, the term separates them from the earlier, fast-draw action abstractionists, who painted with splatter, splash or broad-brush lunge. These second-generation abstractionists strive for a well-wrought finish, rather than a random record of trial and error.

Manhattan's revamped Jewish Museum this week opens an instructive show called "Toward a New Abstraction," with 47 works by nine of these artists. At first glance, the hard-edge painters seem direct heirs of the cubists and the Bauhaus, of Josef Albers and Mondrian. Their images are bare, blocky and geometric. But where an Albers questions the viewer's retina, these new abstractionists question his emotions. No cubist painting was designed to repel the viewer, to shock him with clashing colors, to fool him. The new abstraction calmly violates logic and frustrates the beholder. The children of the tantrum-prone abstract expressionists have turned out to be a tight-lipped set.

Taunting, Tempting. The works span a narrow spectrum from the formal purity of Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held to the geometric surrealism of George Ortman (see color). Kelly's naked statements of form are bland on the surface; yet he clashes colors like cymbals to drive the viewer's eye into more tranquil corners. Al Held boldly ladles as many as 30 layers of plastic Liquitex paint onto his huge canvases to spell out alphabets in monumental bulk. Slowly, as if one had stared for minutes at any word until it became meaningless, the letters cease being acceptable symbols for language, appear fake and finally turn repulsive. The viewer is challenged and taunted. Are they letters at all, an X or a T? Or are they girders?

George Ortman constructs more than he paints. His multilevel assemblages are children's toys of pegs and holes, painstakingly put together in a jigsaw manner. Each form is separately cut out and inserted into the frame as an illustration of the frustrating search for the round peg to fit the square hole.

With different styles but comparable purposes, others in the show put before the viewer a psychological tension, an ambiguity, a presence that appears after a few minutes' looking. The greatest divorce from action painting lies in the works of the late Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Thinning oils with turpentine, they stained pigment into unsized canvas so that the brush stroke is invisible but the colors clash like a warring spectrum.

Raymond Parker's forms float like the volatile gasbags of a dirigible, separated by fractions of space, as if waiting to rub together in an explosive friction. Paul Brach sticks to an unseductive steely blue surface in which are scored circles and squares almost invisible to the eye. Miriam Schapiro, Brach's wife, shows a series of panels, similar in motif to Renaissance cassoni, or hope chests, in which she paints the fertility symbol of an egg. Over a three-year period, the egg forms grow more nebulous, less sensual, purer.

"High Art." The so-called "hard edge" artists believe that they are reaching for a new classicism. They refer to their work as "high art," as opposed to "pop art." In their self-conscious striving, their purity is strikingly mannerist and overrefined. Colors run contrary to esthetic handbooks, forms repeat until they become rote, composition is twisted out of balance.

But for some time, the public has been feeling cheated by artists painting for themselves rather than for the viewer. However unsettling, the new abstractionists paint for the viewer, coolly calculate, as Director of the Jewish Museum Alan Solomon says, to "draw the beholder into the problem"--and once he is in, keep him in on the hard edge of suspense.

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