The Weather Vane

The most accurate weather vane of the winds of contemporary U.S. art is the annual show at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. "We try to spread a wide net," says Director Lloyd Goodrich, 66. He and his three top staffers traveled all over the U.S. during the past year, poking into galleries and collections to catch the best.

Each of the art hunters makes a list of 150 artists, and when most agree on an artist he gets into the Annual automatically. When two or only one back a candidate, the decision is debated. No prizes are awarded. "It's misleading to the public to crown one artist," says Goodrich. "The show is a report of current creation."

Sometimes Bad Neighbors. This year the Annual's 145 paintings, one per artist and just enough to crowd the Whitney's walls, seem to prove that, despite the popular idea that one style or ism succeeds another, nothing that ever gets into the vocabulary of art ever gets completely out.

Realism is represented by Andrew Wyeth's A Day at the Fair, a drybrush watercolor of a Negro girl alone at home. Its social side is found in Jack Levine's police dogs in Birmingham '63. Geometric expressionism shows in the "hard-edge" painting of Richard Anuskiewicz' blinding checkerboard or in Ellsworth Kelly's triad of yellow tongues. Pop art's proponent is James Rosenquist's Morning Sun, with a plastic awning rising to stifle a billboard model's yawn.

Abstract influence on the figure is found sensationally in a nude, raped, maimed Lavinia, daughter of Titus Andronicus, painted by Larry Rivers (for Show Magazine) to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th birthday. Willem de Kooning's Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point cocks the abstract expressionist's eye at nature. There is even the genial easel tradition in Raphael Soyer's portrait of his painting twin Moses.

From this firmament of talent, TIME picked ten artists of brightening magnitude to show in color (see following pages). Some are well positioned: Sidney Goodman, 27, the boy Hieronymus Bosch of modern horror; Grace Hartigan, 41, who models her environment in color; John Hultberg, 41, vanguard California figurativist; Paul Jenkins, 40, maker of iridescent mental landscapes; Theodores Stamos, 41, abstract expressionist. And there are others who seek their own place in the zodiac:

> JAMES MCGARRELL, 33 is a Hoosier who has taught painting at his native Indiana University since 1959. He enjoys suggesting that the hurdle between a close foreground and a deep landscape be, as he says, "a dramatic jump between the two zones."

> BURT HASEN, 42, is one of a wave of artists backed by the GI Bill, spawned by the New York Art Students League, formed by Hans Hofmann's school (one classmate: Larry Rivers), and matured in Paris. He now teaches at New York's School of Visual Art. Hasen calls his paintings Proustian; his remembrance of things past expresses itself in hundreds of little pictures.

> NEIL WELLIVER, 34, who teaches architectural drawing at Yale, had such divergent mentors as the old Bauhaus sage Josef Albers and Abstract Collagist Corrado Marca-Relli. He synthesizes the former's color sense with the latter's pancake flatness.

> FAIRFIELD PORTER, 56, is the Illinois-born son of a Greek Revival architect. His greatest guide was Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, who told him: "Painting is not objects but the whole surface of the canvas. Don't paint a chair--rather paint the holes in its back." And his representational works, like De Kooning's abstracts, weight all objects--both figures and backgrounds --with even, equal importance.

>REGINALD POLLACK, 39, lived in France from 1948 to 1960 where he mastered the soft, sensuous play of pastels. His delicate colors describe in a lithe brush stroke a buoyant world of twittering angels and playful beasts, and only an occasional hint of tragedy.

The Necessary Margin. More than any other quality, the Whitney Annual has the tone of something afoot. Images of people, places or dreams, in guises that the public could never have anticipated, catch the fickle art lover's eye. And art lovers come in droves. A middle-aged woman declares to another, with culinary sophistication, "That's a poached egg!" A teen-aged boy drags a giggle of girls over to a painting and declares, "That's how to handle space!"

"There's more and more going on," says Goodrich. "The basic increase is in national self-knowledge, self-confidence, sophistication and leisure--a little margin for making things other than money. It's a sign of national vitality, a great country finding its expression."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.