Art: From Underground

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For years Western ears have been alert to whispers that there is in Moscow and Leningrad a cultural underground where a few painters are furtively turning out forbidden abstractions and showing them clandestinely among themselves. Last week the first examples of this art, ten paintings by a necessarily anonymous Russian artist, were put on exhibition in Paris' Right Bank Galerie Daniel Cordier.

Gallery Owner Cordier's show was an odd outgrowth of last summer's Moscow Youth Festival. Traveling in Russia at the time of the festival, Cordier was approached by a French-speaking intermediary who gave him the paintings and volunteered the information that the painter was the 27-year-old son of a Soviet functionary, a resident of Leningrad. Cordier smuggled the canvases out in a yard-wide roll of cotton cloth. While the young painter might well have had access to foreign art magazines, Cordier feels the work is too "naive" and violently experimental to suggest that he had seen any Western examples at close hand.

"Here is a young man, reaching for expression in a field largely unknown and presumably forbidden to him," said Cordier. The paintings indicated little more than a novice's groping attempts at abstract art, but they showed a high degree of artistic consciousness. They also gave proof that no matter how tightly sealed off Russian painters may be, there is, as one Parisian artgoer put it, "only one cosmos in art."