ABSTRACTIONS FOR EXPORT

These pictures are strictly the latest thing. This week they are being shown in a Paris gallery, along with 17 other examples of "American Vanguard Art." The U.S. has welcomed a lot of hard-to-take art from Paris, and this collection seems calculated to show Paris that U.S. abstractionists can dish it out too.

Critics who may object to such a choice of exports from the U.S. are likely to be reminded that most of their predecessors stuffily condemned every new art movement since Manet. Yet there is nothing really new about U.S. abstractionism. It is just more helter-skelter than the kind practiced in Europe ever since World War I.

But the movement grows apace; fully a third of Manhattan's art shows reflects it, and more & more art lovers claim to love it. Connoisseurs croon over the "technical mastery" of a Jackson Pollock (who dribbles his colors from pails of paint). They borrow such Hans Hofmann phrases as "push and pull on the picture surface" and "empathy in a psychoplastic and rhythmic sense" to praise a Hofmann canvas. When Abstractionist Willem de Kooning admits that he is "still working out of doubt," they can hardly bring themselves to believe it.

Parisians, who have long been glutted and lately bored with the abstractions of their own compatriots, may be somewhat intrigued by the extremes to which abstraction has been stretched in the U.S. But a traveling U.S. exhibit which included the works of such conservatives as Hopper, Burchfield and Wyeth would do more than intrigue the French. It might even show them that the U.S. has a solid and fruitful tradition of its own.

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