Words & Pictures

Thousands may disagree, but hundreds of art lovers argue that Manhattan, not Paris, is the new queen city of contemporary painting. The "New York School" of abstract expressionist art, sparked by such painters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, has long been characterized by big, wild, inchoate canvases meant to represent only moods. Now that seems to be changing; leaders and followers alike are beginning to knead chunks of the physical world into their abstractions.

Among the critics who have taken hope from the shift is the New York Times's Howard Devree. Until recently, he recalls, "arguments were put forth in various quarters that the picture existed for itself in its own right -that the colors and forms employed were sufficient unto themselves, that the artist lived in his picture, that the picture was a work of tensions, and so forth ... It was said that the artist was keeping pace with science; relativity and the time-space continuum were called upon; and for the most ambiguous of statements in paint it was asserted that the artist was reflecting the confusion, the disillusion, of our times. "This sort of rationalization after the fact reached such a point . . . that the correspondent of one European paper was moved to refer to some of the more extreme nonobjective painters as 'the deadend kids of the Absolute' and their work as 'wallpaper metaphysics.' "

Surveying the Manhattan scene last week, however, Critic Devree hopefully concluded that "the more extreme movement in abstraction has entered upon a period of revaluation. In much of the nonobjective or expressionist abstract work clear elements of figuration and suggestion of landscape inspiration appear increasingly in the paintings. If this tendency continues, the gap that has widened for the better part of a century between the artist and the people who look at pictures may shortly pose less of a problem."

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