The Lively Answer

Who are the hundred leading artists in the world today? That is a good journalistic question, and Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook, 84, Britain's most opinionated publisher, believes that a good journalistic question deserves an answer. Last week the Beaver's answer went on view at his modern little Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, N.B.

To organize the show, Beaverbrook assigned John Richardson, 39, art critic of his London Evening Standard. Richardson drew up a list of 200 artists, then whittled it down to 102 in consultations with such authorities as Sir Kenneth Clark, former director of London's National Gallery, and Alfred Barr of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The show is called the Dunn International after the present Lady Beaverbrook's first husband, Canadian Steelmaker Sir James Dunn.

Glass of Water. Lord Beaverbrook, plagued with ailments, stayed home on the Riviera, but chances are that as a man whose favorite painting is a Gainsborough, he would have recoiled from most of the choices. Although such top representational painters as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth sent comfortably realistic scenes to settle the eye, there was plenty else to make it boggle, from Barnett Newman's eccentric, hard-edge stripes in his Black Fire to Robert Rauschenberg's Trophy II, a pop art combine in four pieces equipped with a real glass of water on a shelf with a spoon kerplunk in it. The only true portraits, surprisingly, are Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning's Marilyn Monroe and Pop Artist James Rosenquist's Portrait of the Scull Family. Little-known names among the 102 were Australia's Brett Whiteley and a young Indian named Mohan Samant.

The omissions, of course, were as controversial as the selections. Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still exercised their customary refusal to be in group shows; Francis Bacon is currently miffed at Beaverbrook for selling two of his paintings, and he stayed out. The judges inexplicably omitted Hans Hofmann even as Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a huge admiring retrospective of his work.

All at Sea. The Dunn Foundation provided six equal prizes of $5,000 each. A few artists, such as Picasso and De Kooning, were by their own request hors concours. After that, the judges--British Art Expert Douglas Cooper, Andrew Ritchie, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Peter Wilson, chairman of Sotheby's, the London art auctioneers--did their heroic, committee-like best. One prize went to the immaculate realist Alex Colville, like Beaverbrook a native of New Brunswick, partly because--as one judge put it--"we all felt one Canadian ought to be chosen as a matter of courtesy."

Best known among the other winners were Sam Francis, who lofts petals of color on huge expanses of canvas, and Ivan Albright, painter of meticulous magic-realist works. Kenzo Okada won with his serenely pale abstract, Posterity, which blends European and Oriental idioms. Least appealing of the prizewinners were Ennio Morlotti's garishly colored, gouged abstract called Cactus and Paolo Vallorz' standing nude, a throwback to the Art Students League life class.

In Fredericton (pop. 20,000), people were, said Organizer Richardson, "astonished, staggered, horrified, interested, excited, amused and maybe pleased." After a month the exhibition will move to London's Tate Gallery. Even in a big art center it should prove instructive. Picasso's nude and a bleak industrial landscape by British Primitive Laurence Stephen are separated not by a gulf, but by the vast sea that present-day artists venture upon. Beaverbrook's hundred provide a lively answer to an impossible question.

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