Abstract, but Romantic

In the usual welter of abstract expressionist shows around Manhattan last week, the one at the Saidenberg Gallery stood out by reason of its quietness, tenderness and lack of pretension. Gyorgy Kepes (pronounced Keppish) is the first to concede that his work looks pale beside that of more "muscular" practitioners of abstract expressionism. Their art, he adds mildly, "is like therapy; in a desperate situation one has to hit at whatever there is to hit. But there is danger when the defense mechanism becomes a gesture that everyone uses."

Green-eyed, Hungarian-born Artist Kepes, 53, gives the impression of being a polite and watchful visitor at first. But he is more watchful than polite, and ruthlessly articulate. As professor of visual arts at M.I.T., he is used to conducting interprofessional seminars in such elusive studies as "structure" and "continuity," and to thinking out his own esthetic positions in precise if thickly accented terms. "It is not important to me to echo Auschwitz," he says, "or Hiroshima, or the Russian slave camps. We can't compete with such brutality, and we shouldn't just mirror it. What we can find are the seeds of something clean and pure. My generation throws away all hope that one can go beyond the everyday. Yet when one listens to Bach, one hears the focus of 'where to' and not 'where are.' "

Much in demand as a designer of exhibitions, books, and animated murals in stained glass for commercial buildings, Kepes reserves his best hours for painting of the stillest sort, often at the studio of his house in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. He coats each large canvas with thin color, then drips onto it what appear to be blobs, twigs and trailings of plastic glue. Onto the glue he drips sand from the beach. Then he works in gobs of bright color with a palette knife, and finally glazes over most of the picture with more thin sheets of color. The results are physically as fragile, in all probability, as those of an earlier American romantic, Albert Pinkham Ryder. They look fragile, too, like reflections of rain clouds, seaweed, mud flats and ragged gardens in a misty mirror. In his wistful way, Kepes is pioneering in the cloudy abyss between abstraction and romantic nature-painting.

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