Neo-scopist

This week at Manhattan's Morton Galleries, interested visitors stood peering into the insides of six hemispheres a yard in diameter, made of papier mache. Each could be raised or lowered on its stand to fix the spectator's eye in the exact centre, even with the rim. Then by rolling his eyes the gallerygoer could see painted on the inside of the hemisphere everything that had come within the painter's field of vision when he looked wide-eyed at his subject. Responsible for this unique artistic experience was a freckled, 31-year-old artist named Robert Henry Blickenderfer, who has been working on his ''neo- scopes" for three years.

For the past four years Artist Blickenderfer has been employed by the New York Post as a retoucher of photographs. He lives in suburban Astoria with his dark-haired wife, Elsie, whom he met while both were studying at Manhattan's Art Students' League. Flat canvas has always been a strait-jacket to Artist Blickenderfer. Says he: "I theorize that the phenomenon popularly termed 'distortion' in modern art is possibly an effort to compensate for the unnatural flatness. . . . Today, of course, as in any language, the idiom of distortion is used as a hand-down, its source and usage being unknown and unanalyzed. . . . Alas, too, too many artists are mere screwballs intellectually. ..."

Intellectually. Artist Blickenderfer's neo-scopes are ingenious. Effect of them is to place the spectator not at a framed "window'' but inside the scene painted. Artistically, as modest Artist Blickenderfer agrees, they are at best experimental.

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