Impermanent Invasion

Londoners, who have long since succumbed to U.S. jazz, slang, movies and musical comedies, gave a less hospitable reception last week to modern U.S. art. On view at London's Tate Gallery were 209 paintings, sculptures and prints selected by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art as a sequel to its big Paris show (TIME, April 18). London critics in general frankly admitted that they found the experience "disquieting" and even "nightmarish." Decided the London Observer: "Most of these artists seem to reflect the character of a continent at once inquiring, energetic, assertive, and ill at ease."

The trouble was not in such modern old masters as Max Weber, the late Lyonel Feininger (see MILESTONES) and Marsden Hartley, who to British eyes were only American reflections of European trends. And in Edward Hopper's lonely city scenes and George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo, the Sunday Times found "the real rude stuff of native American art." The pained cries of angry outrage were provoked by the abstract expressionists.

As far as the Daily Telegraph was concerned, the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell "bombinate in a void. Nothing is communicated beyond an apparently fortuitous anarchy of pigmentation." "An air of impermanence," said the Observer. The arch-conservative London Times conceded that the abstract-expressionist movement is the "one development in American art ... [that] has gained for the United States an influence upon European art which it has never exerted before." But as for the works themselves, the Times declared: "The large, uncompromising canvases . . . have a monumental impermanence, show a defiance of Art and a kind of strange anonymity. They should be given the favorite American word of 'projects,' and seem intended for abandonment as the frontier advances, for are they not shock troops in the American invasion of painting?"

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