NATURE IN ABSTRACTION

IT is not easy to find meaning amid the drips and daubs, splashes and swirls of contemporary abstract painting. But John I. H. Baur, curator of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art, believes he has found more in U.S. modern art than even the artists admit. He has documented his thesis with the works of 58 abstract sculptors and painters in a touring show, "Nature in Abstraction," now on view at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D. C. The thesis: U.S. abstract painters, consciously or unconsciously, are bringing nature back into the picture as a prime source of inspiration and imagery.

Curator Baur rounded up works ranging from Old Timer John Marin's Movement-Sea or Mountain, As You Will to Willem de Kooning's splashy February, found examples from the East Coast to the West (see color page). Arranged in such all-encompassing categories as "The Land and the Waters," "Light, Sky and Air" and "Cycles of Life and Season," they make a handsome array of abstract art that seems to add a modicum of rhyme and season to what had hitherto seemed merely decorative or chaotic.

Artists' reaction to the Baur thesis reached from surprised agreement to eloquent indignation. William Kienbusch (TIME, June 4, 1956), who sometimes uses photographs in painting nature-titled abstractions, readily admits that nature has long been an at-the-elbow companion. Says John Helicker, another abstractionist: "The best paintings I have ever done relate to the deepest feelings I have had about a place." But old-line Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb grimly dissents: "I never use nature as a starting point, I never abstract from nature, I never consciously think of nature when I paint. In the painting Red Sky, my intention was simply to divide the canvas roughly in two, using red paint in one area and black paint in the other."

Such celebration of painting materials for their own sake (much as if a composer were to write a concerto about, not for a violin) seems on its way out. Strongest trend Baur spotted was "a general but oblique redirection of abstract expressionism toward nature for its own sake." Painter Kyle Morris put it simply: "This kind of painting does not start with nature and arrive at paint, but on the contrary, starts with paint and arrives at nature."

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