What's in Fashion

Visitors to the American pavilion at Venice's 25th biennial show of contemporary art, which opened this week, might well conclude that the U.S. boasts one great painter and six more-or-less indecipherable ones. The State Department had ducked the controversial honor of picking the U.S. entries; instead, the job had been done by officials of the Art Foundation of New York and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

The pavilion's better half was devoted to John Marin, a wry, shy old crow of a man who paints nature as knowingly as Winslow Homer and with even greater freedom (TIME, Jan. 9). As Washington's Duncan Phillips put it in the exhibition catalogue, Marin "is one of the most gifted and important painters since Cezanne and perhaps the best of all masters of watercolor. An individualist and mostly self-taught and indifferent to theories, he sought at the outset of his career for abbreviated personal symbols of color and line--a green triangle for a pine, a zigzag for a wave, symbols comparable to Chinese characters . . ."

Love That Corpse! The paintings by three of the other six artists in the show were picked by the Art Foundation's Alfred M. Frankfurter, who holds that the best U.S. paintings since World War II have been of the "expressionist" school. For Frankfurter, expressionism is a broad enough term to include both Hyman Bloom, who paints moldering corpses with the same loving intensity that Renoir applied to living flesh, and Lee Gatch, whose delicately tinted abstractions look almost like misty landscapes.

Frankfurter's third favorite was Naples-born Rico Lebrun, who first made a hit in the U.S. with slick fashion drawings and illustrations. "But with the beginning of the last war," Frankfurter says, "first his subject matter and then his art started to reveal his real profundity. About five years ago, he began work on sketches for a great Crucifixion that has since assumed a quite different evolution. The monumental picture probably never will be painted, but the specific moments of the great symbol of suffering and regeneration are becoming individual pictures one by one."

With that for a hint, anyone could see that Lebrun's Armour was meant to be Roman, and that the three bent nails in the picture were the ones driven into Christ's hands and feet. But taken by itself, the painting was merely a competent and somewhat somber still life.

Dribble That Adventure! The remainder of the show was selected by the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred H. Barr Jr., whose taste differs sharply from Frankfurter's. It is not the expressionists, Barr maintains, but the abstractionists who have the ball. Among Barr's choices were paintings by Jackson Pollock, who dribbles paint onto his canvases from above to create what Barr calls "an energetic adventure for the eyes," Willem de Kooning, who gets equally helter-skelter results with a brush, and Arshile Gorky.

Gorky was not much appreciated while he lived; critics accused him of imitating Matisse, Braque, Leger, Miro and Kandinsky in turn. But since his death in 1948, a host of younger men have rushed to imitate Gorky's "abstract art of free-flowing form and evocative symbol." To them, it looks great.

Barr and Frankfurter had picked examples of the latest U.S. art fashions to export to Venice. Old John Marin, who sniffs at both abstractionism and expressionism, was the one painter in the U.S. pavilion whose reputation would clearly survive fashion.

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