How They Got That Way

The big paintings in the main gallery of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum are mostly slashing and explosive, but so familiar has modern abstraction become--at least to hardened gallerygoers--that even the most violent of canvases or aggressive of sculptures no longer jar the eye or jangle the nerves. What was new about the Atheneum exhibition was really what was old--samples of these same artists' earlier work that had been hung in the adjoining smaller galleries. In a sense, the show (see color) consisted of 45 instant retrospectives that revealed how 45 of the nation's top painters and sculptors arrived at their present idiom.

The works were assembled by Curator Samuel Wagstaff Jr., and almost all the artists shown have traveled the road from representation to abstraction. Curator Wagstaff was not out to prove that one school is better than the other; he simply wanted to show "the artist's handwriting, his forms, his palette, his style--the meshwork through which he sees life." Jagged Blacks. The most successful of the miniature retrospectives is that of Franz Kline. It begins with a straightforward drawing of David Orr, the collector who came across Kline exhibiting on a Greenwich Village sidewalk 23 years ago. The next work is a snowy landscape in which a black fence runs jaggedly through the scene, much as Kline's thick black abstract strokes do today. The painting called Nijinsky is followed by an illuminating sketch of a rocking chair done in 1951. Here, the chair's structure is so loose that its parts seem about to fly off to form a new and wholly unpredictable pattern. The jump from there to Probst I is not a leap but a hop.

Jackson Pollock's Landscape and Arabesque share the same basic rhythm and even the same somberness of palette, but the Pollock retrospective does not stop there. On view at the Atheneum are two sketchbooks dating back to the days when Pollock was studying with the now unfashionable Thomas Hart Benton. The sketches are studies after the old masters, but they are not direct copies; each in its own right is a fastidious and sensitive work. Along with the sketches are photographs of some early landscapes by Pollock that Benton bought. This was not surprising, for they might have been painted by Benton himself.

The Fugitive Kind. One of the most appealing paintings in the show is the small green figure by Willem de Kooning.

The figure has a fugitive look, as if auguring the disintegration of the image in De Kooning's future work. It is no trick to see that the man who did this painting was the same as the one who did the free-swinging Tree That Grows in Naples. The before-and-after paintings of Mark Tobey seem to have no such relationship: in his solid little early portrait, there is no hint of his future fixation with intangibles--with waves of energy, moving forces or reflections of light. But in between the portrait and his Rive Gauche is a painting called Voice of the Doll, which shows the ghostly figure of a soldier apparently clothed in scraps of newspaper. Whatever the wartime symbolism, the shredded image provides at least the hint of a bridge between the old Tobey and the present one.

The Atheneum exhibition should do away with one outworn illusion: that abstract artists are abstract because they cannot paint images. Esteban Vicente's portrait of his little daughter and the early sculptured heads by Sculptors Reuben Nakian and Louise Nevelson prove that these artists could have successfully stuck to representation had they chosen to. Other early works are not so reassuring. Mark Rothko's floating rectangles, controversial though they are, at least have an air of mystery, and many admirers have fallen under their spell. Had Rothko stuck to realism, as in his Two Women in a Window, his name might not even be known today.

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