FROM THE GRASS ROOTS

THE early greats of American painting-such men as John Copley, Gilbert Stuart and Benjamin West-were influenced chiefly by British masters. But with the winning of independence, Americans found new confidence in home talent. Untrained artists began proudly advertising themselves as "self-taught," and for the next century native portraitists, landscapists and genre painters did a brisk business. They were simple, humble men, who seldom signed their work. Many hit the road each spring, offering their services at farmhouses from Maine to Georgia.

A memorable display of the nation's early art from the grass roots opens this week in the cool marble splendor of Washington's National Gallery. The show includes more than 100 top items from the 1,500-picture collection amassed since World War II by Edgar William Garbisch-and his wife (the former Bernice Chrysler). The entire collection will eventually be presented to the National Gallery, making that repository of Old World masterpieces a good deal more "national" than heretofore.

In the catalogue introduction, Curator John Walker achieves what is perhaps the best definition yet of "primitive painting"-at least as it applies to the Garbisch , collection. Underlying the whole show, Walker suggests, "is a method of delineation that is realistic but not naturalistic. It is an objective statement of fact to which lack of technical accomplishment adds a touch of fantasy. It is an idea of a person, a place, or an object, around which the artist, so to speak, puts a line. But such representation is rarely achieved without a certain stress and strain. Part of the charm of these pictures lies in the tension between a recalcitrant image and the artist's determination to get it down on his canvas or panel . . . Basically realistic, he manages to convey the specific character of his subject with a vividness which the academic painter, trained to generalize and to idealize, often loses."

The portraits opposite and the farm and genre scenes on the following page well illustrate Walker's text. In them a plain-Jane, a complacent family, a fruitful farm and a brutal sport are presented head on, neatly and with no nonsense. Yet the girl's iron coiffure, the bilateral symmetry of the family's bird cages, the minted gold sky over the farmstead and the shoe-button eyes of the battle royal's 129 spectators are vivid touches for all their technical clumsiness.

About the time of the Civil War, the grass roots of American painting started to wither. Photography and the color lithographs of Currier & Ives beat the primitive professionals out. But now, with amateur primitives burgeoning year by year, the nation's art may be in the process of developing a brand-new set of grass roots.

-All-American center who made football history in the 1922 Army-Navy game by place-kicking the winning field goal diagonally from the 47-yard line.

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