ART
THE supposedly detached documentation of the American "tough" school of. literature is in most cases sentimental at heart. Much the same compound of romanticism and rapportage may be found in the examples of American "symbolic realism" at the Institute of Contemporary Art's gallery at 17 Dover Street. It is perhaps significant that the first—and best—account of French neo- romanticism was American (by James Thrall Soby). The two leading painters of that movement subsequently crossed the Atlantic. and their influence in America has been considerable. The last fifteen years, however, have seen their devices for isolating certain emotive qualities of poignancy and evanescence grow ever more desperate, until finally they have beer: led outside painting altogether. Hints earlier accepted from the waifs of Picasso's blue period, from Pryde's architectural fantasies and the eighteenth-century ruin- painters, and from the long perspectives and chance associations of surrealism, these were succeeded by ,such a reductio ad absurdum as Berman's trompe l'oeil cracks and chips and holes painted on the surface of his pictures. (Orie of the frames in Dover Street appears to have had some worm-holes specially drilled in it.) Tchelitchew, some of whose latter-day works are included in the current exhibition, has lost himself in a curious maze of transcendental anatomy lessons.
The moral is that symbols and conceptual devices, however sensitive the mind they spr,ing from, are no substitute for tobservation and the mechanics of pictu're-making. Once they embrace more than half the content of ,a picture, the result ceases to be painting. It must be admitted that most of these American artists are deficient as plastic architects, and all too often their work fails to rise above the level of good commercial illustration. The typical American painting—and at one point at least, all those on show touch this common denominator—is compounded of social comment, the candid camera and Diego Rivera. It is drawn with a boneless academic realism and an over-emphasis of form which a conceptual lighting reduces to generalisations as bulbous as a jelly-mould car. It maintains a ceaseless insistence on local colour, which, darkened with black to produce shadows, re-introduces all the mud that the impressionists fought to banish for ever. It tends to a dry, hot surface, tickled with a one-hair brush, that lacks all painterly qualities.
This is doubtless an over-statement in any single case. But the theatrical-literary conceits of Cadmus are scarcely to be taken seriously ; the hothouse precision of hallucination sought by Jared French is borrowed from Berard: Koerner is painstaking but life- less ; Perlin exists only in the shadow of Ben Shahn ; Wyeth's mannered composition cannot disguise his textural aridity—and these are the five best painters after Tchelitchew. An interesting
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