Screwball Art

To the industrial designer, the important thing is to make the design of his gadgets fit their purpose (see col. 1). Pure artists have no purpose that fits anything in particular; all they want is to get into paint and stone their own, sometimes highly individual view of the world around them. Purest of today's pure artists are the abstractionists, who break up what they see into geometric designs, and surrealists, who try to put nightmares and nervous breakdowns on canvas. Pure Philistines hopefully call both these schools screwball art. Last week Manhattanites got a good look at two new screwball artists, one of each kind.

The abstractionist was a husky, stubble-headed, Indiana-born sculptor named David Smith, who welds and hammers his scraps of iron in a waterfront studio in a corner of Brooklyn Terminal Iron Works. Mr. Smith's iron work at the Neumann-Willard Gallery bears such titles as Head as Still Life, Unity of Three Forms, Leda, looks to the uninitiated like miscellaneous plumbing that has survived a conflagration. But to those who know their abstract iron onions, these arthropodal trivets are as good as they come. For his material, he sometimes ransacks junk yards, picks over leftovers from the neighboring iron works. Of his neighbors the boilermakers, he says: "They are pretty swell to me, even though they don't know what it's all about."

The new surrealist was Wolfgang Paalen, a Netherlands-born Parisian, whose particular Freudian fairyland looks like an Arthur Rackham landscape that has begun to putrefy. A member of Paris' "younger school" of dream-painters, Surrealist Paalen is fervently opposed to Old Master Salvador Dali. Reason: Dali is getting too much gravy. Glib, stylish and frightening as last year's millinery, Wolfgang Paalen's cobwebby paintings at the Julien Levy Gallery are constructed in a method all his own. Surrealist Paalen smears his canvas with an even coat of white paint, then holds it over a burning candle, gets his tip on what to do next from the smudges left by the smoke.

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