An American Largeness

Ever since Jackson Pollock and the first abstract expressionists began enlarging their canvases back in the late 1940s, American paintings have been getting bigger and bigger. To show the lengths--and heights--that artists are going to nowadays, Manhattan's Jewish Museum this week put on display 23 mural-size paintings, with a total area of 2,883 sq. ft. The smallest, James Bishop's Story, is a mere 61 ft. sq. The largest, Al Held's Greek Garden, is a breathtaking panorama of cabalistic circles, squares and triangles that measures 12 ft. high--and 56 ft. long.

The museum's curator, Kynaston McShine, who selected the paintings, unpretentiously bills his exhibit as an "airy, informal, summer exhibition of big, beautiful paintings." The show includes both abstract and representational art. Veteran Abstractionist Gene Davis sets the eye dancing in Phantom Tattoo with a 10-ft. by 19-ft. cascade of multicolored awning stripes. Ellsworth Kelly does three giant, economy-size rectangles of flat color (one each of red, yellow and blue) covering 89 sq. ft. Alfred Jensen's four-paneled impasto consists of dozens of big squares, little squares, houndstooth checks, checkerboards and signal flags--all in a canvas measuring 7 ft. by 28 ft. Alex Katz deftly pinpoints a life-size Lawn Party, in a realistically painted 9-ft. by 12-ft. canvas populated by all his friends and neighbors down in Maine.

Why do the artists love big canvases? "Largeness," McShine answers, "is part of the American esthetic. The large painting is generally more of a challenge than a small one." Painter

Kelly agrees. "Paintings," he says, "have been expanding lately because we need to see things more clearly. An artist wants to say something that can compete with everything else that's being done. There are big images everywhere around us--bigger jets, bigger bridges, and factories--our whole new way of living." To Al Held, who worked on Greek Garden for two years, bigness "gives me the scale that I'm looking for, the presence that I want. I'm not trying to make an equation that size equals quality, but to me bigness just means I've got a bigger playground, both in the real and the metaphysical sense."

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