Experimenter

Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries this week turned their walls over to able 47-year-old Russell Cowles. Interesting, salable, the canvases on view varied in style from Cezannesque still lifes and New Mexican street scenes and landscapes to wild abstractions and such extreme experiments as Artist Cowles' self-portrait in a bathtub.

Russell Cowles is the second of the six children of Gardner Cowles, 73-year-old publisher of the Des Moines Register and

Tribune and onetime director of Herbert Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp. A Dartmouth graduate, Son Russell won the Prix de Rome as a muralist about 20 years ago. His later rebellion against the stiffness of academic tradition is still a driving force behind his constant technical experiments. In the Cairo American Express office seven years ago he met the former Women's Page Editor of the New York Sun, eloped with her within two weeks to Munich. He has spent six months in Bali, lives part of every year in Santa Fe. Of his painted abstractions last week he explained:

"They are the five-finger exercises of art. They sharpen the artist's tools so that he can more effectively put over his message, for all art has a message even though the artist may not be able to put it into words."

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