MORE IN SORROW

Of all the angry young artists who came to maturity in the 1930s, few seemed angrier than Philip Evergood, his voice still booms, his eyes go wide, his his hands and arms slash the air. And some of his paintings still roar with indignation. But by last week when when Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art opened its first Evergood retrospective show, the famed anger had mellowed into something hauntingly gentle.

Had he so chosen, Philip Evergood could have lived a perfectly respectable life. His father, an artist named Blashki, was an Australian Jew of Polish descent who emigrated to the US but his mother was a member of a well-to-do Anglican family who was determined to have a son educated in her native England. son educated in her native England. When Philip failed to get past the Committee of Admirals for entrance into for entrance into the Naval Trainging College at Osborner, his father fired an angry letter to First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, demanding to know whether the boy's last name had influenced the admirals. Convinced that it had, Meyer Blashki renamed himself and his son Evergood, and the boy duly did time at both Eton and Cambridge. But Cambridge and Philip did not long agree, for he finally made up his mind that all he wanted to do was paint.

The Agony. He studied in London, New York and Paris (where he met his wife Julia ), eventually settled in Manhattan. By that time, the Depression had hit. The bleak agony of it made its way onto canvas after canvas: the bloody strikes, the mine disasters, that numbing, job losing moment that Evergood recorded as The Pink Dismissal Slip Evergood himself was a part of the famed "219 Strike," in which 219 artists staged an ill-fated demonstration against being swept from the rolls of the WPA. He was clubed into sensibility, spent the night in a cell ankle-deep in filth. On canvas, Evergood's figures were apt to be as chunky as himself, his colors applied in solid intricately designed blocks. But the mood could be as soft as a glow. In Portrait of my Mother, he painted a woman who, doggedly masking her pain, calmly awaits certain death from cancer. And in Forebears Were Pioneers (see color), he paid tribute to a stiff-backed old lady he happened to see seated with a kind of majesty in the midst of the ruins left by the New England hurricane of 1938.

The Pitch. Today, in his converted Connecticut barn, Philip Evergood says of Forebears: "I could not possibly paint that picture again. Maybe my hand has gone forward, maybe backward, but no artist can remain the same." Now in considerable demand ("In a time when 90% of painting is abstract, there is, happily a segment of the world that comes to me.") Evergood no longer has to struggle over design "Now I beleive that I can take a palette knife and with one slashing movement suggest what I labored over before. His colors, he says, are "juicier," his pitch is ofter "in the highest key." Occasionally he will vent his rage in brilliant, clashing clutters of symbolic figures. But there remains an almost childlike sweetness that Evergood has never been able to outgrow. "Oh, that," says he of a painting. "That's just a sad little Negro girl who is all alone in the straggly bit of forest she has wandered into. She is happy for a moment, maybe because she's out of Tobacco Road for a while. Maybe it it's only in her dreams, I don't know".

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