American Abroad

Gertrude Stein, with that clarity of hers which has served to confuse an entire generation, remarked of John Ferren in Everybody's Autobiography: "He is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might, only perhaps nobody can, do that thing called abstract painting. The minute painting gets abstract, it gets pornographic. . . ."

Although 1) a great many artists have been doing more or less abstract painting for 30 years, and 2) most of it can be pornographic only to the pornographic, Pundit Stein's judgment of Artist Ferren made some sense last week in Paris when the Galerie de Beaune displayed 18 of his new works. Critics found them fully abstract, only remotely Freudian, with more depth and movement than most abstract paintings. This was because Artist Ferren has the .inventiveness to paint curving forms in space which are as interesting and satisfactory to look at as, say, a page of designs for ships' propellers, done in color.

That Artist Ferren's new, colorful pastels thus differed from the "flat" school of abstract painting is traceable to his training. A pleasant young man with brown hair and a bright orange mustache, John Millard Ferren, 33, started as a sculptor in 1926. He learned plaster casting in a Los Angeles plaster factory, tombstone cutting in San Francisco. As aids to the problems he was trying to work out in stone, he found himself covering sheets of paper with abstract drawings. In 1930 he began to paint, in 1931 worked his way to Paris, where he found a market for abstractions. He has stayed close to his market ever since.

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