Magic Ambiguity

"I do not believe that art should be explicit," says Balcomb Greene. "It should be suggestive and ambiguous so that the viewer has to enter in." Last week at a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan viewers could see how magic Greene's ambiguity has been. His unearthly colors intrigue--not so much as color, but as shifting shadings of darkness and light. His forms seem to float by like changing clouds of steam, twisting into shapes that are now recognizable, now wholly abstract.

Fallen Women. Though he drew as a child, it never occurred to Balcomb Greene, who is now 57, that art could be a man's life work. His father, a Methodist minister, was forever being moved about--from Niagara Falls, where Greene was born, to an assortment of towns in Iowa, Colorado and South Dakota, and finally back to New York. Greene majored in philosophy at Syracuse University, studied psychology in Vienna. When he bucked for an M.A. in English literature at Columbia University he might have been doomed to an academic career had not a fusty professor refused to accept his thesis on "The Fallen Woman in 17th Century English Fiction."

It was not until 1931, when he was 27, that he finally made up his mind to take up art seriously. In 1936, while the art of social protest seemed the noisiest thing around, Greene became head of a new little society called American Abstract Artists. His early work was geometrical, "rational, impersonal, almost mathematical"; but it did not stay that way for long. The geometry had a way of resembling a hard-edged landscape or interior. By the mid '40s, shredded bits of the human figure began to appear. The square and the rectangle had become a prison: "I wanted to introduce the curve, so using the nude model I began the study of curved movements."

Smashing Sea. Since Greene has always been more interested in the play of light than in color for its own sake, he used a muted palette that mostly shunned the red end of the spectrum. In The Sea (see color), great waves smash upon the rocks, but the painting itself has the limitlessness of abstraction. And the abstraction called Composition 1958 really began with a figure lying on a couch, but the figure has so receded into the environment that its presence can only be felt. In other paintings, parts of a face or body may fill the whole canvas, but only in fragments. Always the intentional ambiguity is there.

Greene clings to the figure because he feels that today's world has become dehumanized enough without the artist's making it more so. If pure abstraction once meant freedom for the artist "to paint any way he wishes," it is now to Greene a negative license without real meaning. "The artist's freedom," says he, "must again be defined in relationship to the world, which means visually for the visual artist. Some degree of representation is again demanded of him."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.