Inclusive Ism

A layman, confronted with "abstract" art, is apt to lapse into the language of the Two Black Crows and say: "What causes that?" Probably two things: 1) the development of photography, which reproduces reality much better than 'any painter could; 2) the progress of experimental science.

About 1870, artists began retreating from realism. With every fresh retreat they dug themselves a new redoubt, hoisted a flag and proclaimed a new ism. Impressionism and neoImpressionism held that artists should paint with prismatic colors, imitating the effect of light. Synthetism held that they should not. Fauvism held that artists should paint flat, abstract decorations; Cubism, that the subject should be broken up into planes. Futurism, Orphism, Expressionism, Synchronism, Abstract Dadaism,

Rayonism, Machinism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Purism, Concretionism--by the 19205 there were so many isms that the artists themselves got mixed up. Because these later isms had one thing in common--a lack or near-lack of recognizable realistic subject matter--one word survived to describe them: Abstractionism.

Last week, on Manhattan's 57th Street, four of the leading abstractionists broke out with simultaneous exhibitions. Argentine-born Frenchman Fernand Leger started out as a Cubist with Braque and Picasso in 1910. Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky and U. S.-born, German-bred Lyonel Feininger were long masterminds of Germany's Bauhaus group. Spanish-born Joan Miro is a surrealist who is more abstract than Surrealist Salvador Dali. Least abstract of the four abstractionists' pictures were those of stocky Fernand Leger, who now lives in the U. S. Leger's intricate designs, drawn with thick, coally lines and colored in flat patches, were made up of recognizable hands, faces, tree roots, fried eggs, birds and feet, looked a little like elaborate sculptural reliefs. Abstractionist Feininger's subject matter was also recognizable, but his ships and buildings looked, when he was through with them, like earthquakes viewed through a shattered plate-glass window. Abstractionist Kandinsky ran the gamut from fairly conventional, mosaic-like landscapes to amoebic shapes painted on plaster-like surfaces. Most typical Kandinskys were in crescents and triangles, resembled an explosion in a kaleidoscope factory. Abstractionist Miro had littered potato-sack burlap with insectile, wire-worky lines, spots and doodads. Miro's titles were less abstract than his pictures. Samples: A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb; Women Greeting the Crescent of the Moon; Personages Magnetized by the Stars (see cut)

To apprehensive men-from-the-street, seeking shelter from last week's blizzard, these abstractions looked like good clean lunatic fun. But the people who went there on purpose could point out that the simplified cubes and planes of this unrealistic art have influenced nearly every type of modern decoration, from typography, magazine layout, window display and fashion design to streamlining and modern architecture.

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