Cloud Busters in Houston

Texas, as everybody knows, thrives on super-scale. So naturally, the art season in Houston started off with two handsome shows dedicated to four maximal creators. At the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Director James Johnson Sweeney has a mammoth retrospective of the works of Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis, 44, whose canvases have been getting so large that he is building a new studio in California in which to paint them. And Houston's University of St. Thomas Art Gallery put on view 147 designs by three farsighted 18th century French architects, one of whom envisioned a gargantuan stadium with seven times the capacity of the 45,000-seat Houston Astrodome.

As far as Sweeney is concerned, the explosion in the size of Francis' canvases is matched only by the growing exuberance in the artist's use of colors. In the early 1950s, Francis' dappled abstracts were tight, taut and somewhat somber, a reflection of his cramped environment in Paris. But in 1957, he took a trip around the world, stayed five months in Japan, established a new home base in Santa Monica Canyon, Calif. For him, it was as if the clouds had parted, and down poured a torrent of scattered forms and heightened colors. "Francis," says Sweeney, "has become a master of decoration in the grand style." The largest Francis, a 13-ft. by 19-ft. canvas called Meaningless Gesture, dominates the museum's cavernous Cullinan Hall, where Sweeney has hung it 15 ft. above the floor.

Bears for Columns. The gigantic sculptural buildings designed by the three visionary architects whose plans are exhibited at St. Thomas have long been studied by subsequent architects because they foreshadow so many buildings built in the 20th century. Etienne-Louis Boullee (1728-99) was a popular teacher at Paris' Royal Academy of Architecture who designed giant globular monuments as a means of classroom elucidation. Among the remaining sketches of his works is one of a projected monument for Sir Isaac Newton, consisting of a giant sphere pierced by tiny openings to simulate starlight. Today's planetariums and, indeed, even Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes recall his precedent.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), a protege of Madame du Barry's who was appointed one of Louis XV's official architects in 1773, designed a spherical county ranger's house, 50 royal toll houses and observation posts, and a workers city for the state-owned saltworks of the Franche-Comte. The French Revolution intervened before any of his projects were built; but his company towns have long since been translated into reality.

Even the bizarre designs left behind by Rouen's Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1825), who lived and died in poverty, obscurity and probable madness, have now been built in an era when modern steel and prestressed concrete make possible feats of construction that could only have been dreamed of in the 18th century. Lequeu's surrealistic designs for barns shaped like cows, and palaces with columns in the forms of deer and bears have been echoed not only in the fantastic churches designed by architects like Spain's Antoni Gaudi, but also in the animal-and coffeepot-shaped roadside stands of California.

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