Petronius Unbound

It has not been so long since one of the juvenile leads of '60s New York art was seen, at a party, to peer at one of Alexander Liberman's painted steel sculptures and snicker, "Huh! Vogue fingernail red!" A common prejudice: for years Liberman has borne the reputation of having too much grace under too little pressure. He is accused of having a "designer's eye." Spelled out, this means that Liberman is good at reeling off elegant solutions to undemanding formal problems but has no very striking imagination of his own. Besides, he is editorial director of Conde Nast--Petronius Arbiter in a gray suit--and there are critics who (subliminally, no doubt) feel that nobody as socially conspicuous as that should be treated with complete seriousness as an artist.

As a result of all this, Liberman has for some time been one of the most underrated artists working in America; and though his sculpture has lately been getting some overdue recognition, his painting rests in a kind of limbo. This, as his current exhibition at Manhattan's Andre Emmerich Gallery indicates, is a considerable injustice.

Crafted Skin. The show consists of Liberman's abstract paintings on the motif of a circle, done between 1950 and 1961. It is old work and put there to make an argument. Liberman, by and large, was left out of the accounts of New York art in the '50s; the very look of his paintings tells why. Rather than the complicated, relational colors of much abstract expressionism, Liberman used plain primaries. Instead of free drawing, he used ruler and compasses. Rather than drips and splashy brushwork, he went in for the most even and perfectly crafted skin of paint--flat, enameled, not a hair mark showing. Nothing could look less like a '"50s picture" than the smooth, symmetrical, emblematic formats Liberman was making in the 1950s. Except for one thing--his obsession with chance.

Chance--the random drip, the unsought image--bulked large as an issue among New York painters then. Liberman built chance into his work in a typically calculated way. He planned his accidents. Two early pictures in the show were done by tossing poker chips onto a canvas, marking where they fell and painting in the dots. The circles vibrate optically; the whole performance suggests a gambler's desinvolture, but preserved, fixed, a gesture trapped under glass. This way of stabilizing chance gives Liberman's early work its unique flavor, both improvised and severe enough to verge on the monumental.

It is understandable that Liberman did not attract much attention in the '50s. What seems incomprehensible is the way his work was publicly ignored while being covertly raided by other artists in the '60s. Though nobody holds the copyright on circles, Liberman's use of them predicted the target motifs of 1960s color-field painting.

When Liberman sent paintings out to be fabricated by craftsmen or sign painters in the early '50s, other artists frowned on that as "mechanical." But in the next decade, when preplanned works made to the artist's order became an "issue," Liberman, who by then had gone back, or on, to a splashier style, was criticized for being too obsessed with the handmade object. He had exploited optical dazzle in works like After-image (1955) long before Op art was ever heard of. His use of chance and planned matrices foreshadowed the later interest in serial and process imagery, but he never got credit for that either.

One does not have to make extravagant claims for Liberman as some kind of closet daemon of art history in order to note that his exclusion from the official version of recent American painting is an error. Perhaps, after this admirable small show, a retrospective may come to put him in focussbRobert Hughes

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