Different Accents

Art is an international language, but it is often spoken with strong national accents. In Manhattan last week, three artists from abroad were proving the point with one-man shows. All three speak impressively, but in strikingly different ways:

Prince Henry of Hesse, 26, grandson of the late King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, speaks with the elegant inflection of European royalty in 31 nostalgically surrealist paintings on exhibit in the Carstairs Gallery. His theme: memories of his own fairy-tale childhood spent among crowned and sceptered relatives in castles, palaces and splendiferous watering places (he is also a great-grandnephew of the late Kaiser Wilhelm, a cousin of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II).

Prince Henry started painting shortly after World War II in a run-down family castle in Germany. When his royal Italian grandparents went into Egyptian exile in 1946, he followed them, had his first show in Alexandria. Now he lives on the Italian island of Ischia, painting dreamlike scenes from "a world that is forever gone and finished." His pictures are filled with sculptured formal gardens, marble statuary, gay toy balloons--and a fine, whimsical sense of humor. In Reverie, a classic marble statue, all played out from sailing a paper boat, lies sleeping near a river, still clutching in one hand a red string attached to the boat. In Tinned, Prince Henry packs delicate, dew-fresh red roses in a sardine can. Says he: "Today everything gets put in cans; why not something romantic, like roses?"

Sabro Hasegawa, 47, a Japanese exhibiting at The Contemporaries, expresses himself with a somewhat less intelligible accent that mixes abstractionism and Eastern inscrutability. But even when the words are not understandable, Hasegawa's intent is clear: to convey peace, order and dignity through form and design. His favorite method: wood-block printing. He dips pieces of wood into Chinese ink, prints directly onto rice paper. The result, as in a four-paneled screen called The Harmonious, is a pleasing arrangement of black and grey rectangles. He uses color sparingly, feels that his black ink "is very colorful." Sometimes he brushes his prints with ink, as in Man and Celestial, a simple arrangement of printed forms and two painted crescents that seems to radiate reverence. He also works with wax, sometimes draws in ink with a chopstick, even uses a dish mop of cellulose sponge.

Hasegawa has at times been as withdrawn from reality in life as in the strange shapes and forms of his art. He studied at Tokyo University, got interested in Sesshu. the great 15th century Japanese Buddhist painter, and this led him to Zen Buddhist monasteries, where he used to sit for hours under the supervision of monks, trying to learn to exclude all thought from his mind, submerge himself in peaceful oblivion. In the early '30s he went to Europe, where he came under the influence of Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Arp and Alexander Calder. Says he: "I'm a fellow who has been suffering between the East and West for 30 years."

Per Krohg, one of the grand old (65) men of modern Norwegian painting, speaks his artistic mind with the clear and refreshing eloquence of a song by Grieg. The 42 Krohg oils on view at the Galerie St. Etienne are bright with sweeping colors and full of robust naturalism and the hardiness of his homeland: fishermen beside their boats, woodsmen among hoar-frosted trees, farmers watching a dogfight. A gaily tinted landscape, Frogner, is as clean and invigorating as a drink of chilled aquavit on a summer's day; in The Dinner, Krohg fills a formal dining room with stuffed and complacent charac ters right out of an Ibsen play. Krohg's artistic voice is clear, healthy and unmis- takably Norwegian.

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