Toys in the Gallery

Some elves with names like Calder, Feininger, Marisol and Jones have in recent years and months been busy making Christmas toys, and this week their work fills Manhattan's Betty Parsons Gallery. Anyone with, say, $5,000 left in his Christmas Club kick will be able to pick up a lot of things like they don't have at F.A.O. Schwarz--not that the kids wouldn't rather have a bikini for their Barbie doll.

The show purports to demonstrate "playfulness" in modern art, and in many cases it does. Lyonel Feininger is represented by a Toy City with People, 17 carved and painted wooden pieces as finely wrought as his satiric cartoons. One diminutive inhabitant is a girl no more than an inch high whose brown pigtails fly out from her head like helicopter rotors. Marisol (that's the only name she uses) checked in with a doll of a self-portrait--a foam rubber figure 3 ft. tall, with one red velvet lip, one of red silk. The doll looks like Marisol, who herself looks like something drawn by Charles Addams.

Feininger and Marisol are not for sale, and--fortunately--neither is Alexander Calder's Pull Toy with Rocks. The usually delicate Calder touch does not work on the four Ballantine Ale cans he has strung together with wire and filled with clashing, crashing stones. Pop Artist Andy Warhol perpetrates a botu-listic sick joke: a dozen T shirts (which unadorned sell for 50-c- apiece) carry his silk-screen representation of the tainted tuna tins that poisoned two Detroit housewives nine months ago Price: $300 each.

The most startling toy in the show was contributed not by a painter or sculptor but by a musician. Joe Jones, 29, is an unknown composer-- whose seemingly playful intention is to get a head in music. He has done it with a $250 hat, atop which stands a skeletal drummer and a ghostly dancer. When the hat is pulled down tight, the drummer's eyes light up and he begins a rhythmic tattoo, while the dancer follows his every beat. Prices or "playfulness" notwithstanding, Santa's North Pole helpers were never like this. Nor was "art."

*Not to be confused with Jazz Drummer Jo Jones, 52, of Count Basic fame, who is not to be confused with "Philly Joe" Jones, 40, also a jazz drummer, and none of whom are to be confused with Muralist and TIME Cover Artist Joe Jones, who died last April at 54.

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