Death on the Wall

California's Frederick Wight has nothing against abstract art, except when it is used to express abstract ideas. Abstractions of abstractions, he believes, can only lead to pictures like Malevich's notorious White on White at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. That canvas a white patch on a white patch, might be said to express the idea of purity except that it is too thin and bare to carry the weight of the idea; most people think it must be a joke. Wight's own paintings on show this week at the Pasadena Art Museum, get no chuckles from visitors. His language is instantly recognizable symbolism, and his subject is death.

Now We're Here . . ." From death, that sunken rock of an abstraction, Wights painted ideas ripple out to include what he calls "the transitoriness lite. Now we're here, now we're not." Says he: "I suppose that I would have been a good transcendentalist 100 years ago." He often paints water, finding in its unresting ebb and flow an almost obsessive symbol for the tides of time. On occasion, as in his stormy Clock (see cut) time, tide and the implied threat of shipwreck build together into a powerful unity. At other times he uses a huge winter-stripped, decaying tree to suggest the fact that even the giants of the forest must eventually fall, or paints a rattlesnake coiled in ambush on a mountain slope to "show the precariousness of man's existence."

Broadly and swiftly done, with more dramatic flair than sensuous feeling, his canvases strike right through the retina to the mind. Yet whether his pictures are sufficiently rich in color, firm in drawing and subtle in composition to live beyond the grave is another question. Masterpieces generally are constructed either with the utmost care and polish or else with what Transcendentalist Emerson himself called "nerve and dagger." Wight is too self-conscious to be really bold, too rushed to polish much.

"Too Many Things." Born 54 years ago in Manhattan, Wight never got around to picking any one profession. In the Depression years he wrote three novels, "and just squeaked by." During World War II he rose to the Navy rank of lieutenant commander, took part in the Normandy invasion. After the war he learned museum work under the G.I. bill, has since organized major traveling shows of Orozco, John Marin, Jack Levine, Hyman Bloom, Charles Sheeler Morris Graves (and written monographs on them all).

Now director of the art galleries of the University of California, Wight finds time for painting, teaching and writing all at once. This fall his latest novel (a fictional account of Modigliani's life) will appear, and his latest traveling show (of Abstractionist Hans Hofmann) will open at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Typically, Wight feels embarrassed by his varied successes. "Idon't kid myself " he says in his customary murmur, squinting as if at a disappearing bird. "This showing all over the country, or flying all over creation, is not a virtue. It's a symptom of still being too many things to too many relations." It is also, like Wight's paintings, a running struggle to seize man's brief "adventure in time "

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