Still Able to Surprise

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of all the hundreds of exhibitions put together by the curators of the Great American art boom (circa 1962-73), not one tried to give an account of what was being painted in Europe. The reason, as everyone "knew," was that European art no longer mattered. Paris was over; London, a village; only New York had a hammer lock on history. This eminently questionable belief, fathered by chauvinism and fed by the largest promotional apparatus in the history of art, lay at the root of American art politics in the '60s and formed the taste of a generation of museumgoers. Now the retreat is on. An exhibition called "European Painting in the '70s" opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is the first show of its kind to appear in an American museum since, believe it or not, 1959. Ably organized by Curator Maurice Tuchman, it consists of 65 paintings by 16 artists. The show will travel to the St. Louis Art Museum in the spring of 1976, and to the Elvehjem Art Center in Madison, Wis., in the summer--but not to New York.

It is, of course, impossible to find 16 artists who could represent the full range of style and preoccupation in European art, so Tuchman has restricted his choice mainly to figurative paintings by "loners"--artists who, for one reason or another, have not closely identified themselves with particular groups or movements. Some of the work is familiar to a U.S. audience: the sumptuous paranoia of Francis Bacon's images (TIME, April 7) basking like altarpieces behind their glittering shields of glass and gold leaf; the cool, infrangible poise of David Hockney's still lifes and portraits. Pierre Alechinsky, the Belgian painter, is represented by a group of delectably complex, exuberant paintings, swarming with organic life like microscope slides rendered in calligraphy. There is a group of Sobreteixims by the 82-year-old Joan Miro, hangings woven from thick knotted clumps of rope, charred and then painted with undiminished vitality.

At the other extreme, some of the artists are completely unknown in the U.S.: for example, a Dutch eccentric named Anton Heyboer, who lives with three women in a small dark barn north of Amsterdam and, the catalogue gravely assures us, "is timeless and unconscious, like an animal." Heyboer's life may have the gray neuralgic minimality of a character in Beckett, and the paintings--schematic outline figures scrawled on a white ground--look negligible. Quite different is the work of a Frenchman, Jean-Olivier Hucleux, who has developed a technique of such extreme verisimilitude as to make nearly all U.S. photo-realism seem clumsy and generalized. His favorite subject is, lit erally, nature morte: French graveyards, with their raked gravel, their cakes of black granite brought to a patent-leather gloss, their iconography of morose kitsch. Hucleux paints them down to the last molecule and the result is a form of trompe l'oeil that contrives to be both meditative and irritating, done with a delicacy of touch that defies analysis.

Irony and Narrative. Next to Miro and Dubuffet, the oldest painter in the show is Jean Helion. Having been one of the leading abstract artists in France between the wars, Helion returned to figuration in 1947. "I looked through my studio window," he recalls, "and I found that the outside world was more beautiful than my picture." He is now 71 and at the height of his powers. What pervades his paintings is a wry and original sense of human stance and gesture; under the cubist planes of the surface lies a marked appetite for the sensuality of commonplace things. "A cabbage is a magnificent rose, which is green, which costs one franc a kilo, and which one eats." This generosity about the physical world pervades even a nominally "sinister" Helion like Exorcism, 1973 (see color page): the chair draped with clothes, its legs stuck into shoes, suggests some kind of rural witchcraft, but the sliced pumpkin is as replete with life as a Rubens backside.

There are few parallels in U.S. painting for most of the work in this show.

The preoccupations are not the same.

Nobody else, for instance, can bring off the mixture of lavish Matissean col or, literary irony and veiled narrative -- like disconnected stills from a Fritz Lang film -- from which R.B. Kitaj, in such works as Malta (1974), constructs a new form of history-painting. There is no American equivalent to the cold edgy handling (nightmare as literature, so to speak) in paintings by the Italian Valerio Adami. But the difference especially comes out in "domestic" figurative painting, which seems more complex and problematical -- more difficult of approach -- in Europe than in America. Hence the extraordinary flavor of the nudes and portraits by Lucien Freud, the 52-year-old grandson of Sigmund: more psychic territory is crossed in Freud's scrutiny of a few square inches of worn flesh than one might find in a whole roomful of recent American realism. A similar process happens in Avigdor Arikha's tenacious and diffident still lifes. They are small monuments to the difficulty of naming any object. And like many of the other works in this show, they testify that painting as a form of expression is still wide open, still able to surprise us -- not dead (as it is fashionable to think) but living in Europe.

Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.