Art: The Sparrow

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The most fashionable portraitist now active is René Bouché (rhymes with touché). He may also be the best. Last week at Manhattan's Alexander Iolas Gallery, Bouché had on view a brilliant display of what his flickering, sweet-and-sour brush can do. Recent subjects: Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Anita Loos, Elsa Maxwell, Mrs. William Paley, the Duchess of Windsor, Lady Astor, the Duchess of Argyll and Alexander Calder.

A knowing sparrow of a man, Bouché often asks the glamorous and important to pose for his thin-stained canvases, gives them a drawing for their pains. Bouché's technical equipment, like that of John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, is not prodigious, but exactly suits his ends. He may well rank with those past masters of social portraiture. Bouche is not one to portray the bellhop or the country maid, but flies straight to the inmost circle of society, where the crustiest tycoons really do unbend, all wives are beautiful, and well-tailored bohemians are welcome. In a sense, he adores the lions and tigresses of a world often so polite that it is rude, and so frantic that it is bored.

"My style may be described as a kind of loving criticism," he says. The criticisms are sometimes wrapped in flattery, as when he paints a gauzy profile of the Duchess of Windsor without those wrinkles that are the map of earned character. But Truman Capote he sees devastatingly as a lounging, feline figure, with a prim mouth and enormous cold spectacles. Elsa Maxwell becomes, in a spectacularly strong and concise portrait, a court dwarf out of Velasquez. Says Bouché: "A court jester, but also a desperately serious woman who considers herself a serious critic of society."

The son of a prosperous French businessman, Bouché was born 54 years ago in Prague, traveled much in youth, early demonstrated a flair for art, and made his first big money with fashion drawings for the Paris Vogue. Now settled in Manhattan, he spends a third of each year in Europe, charges $3,000 to $8,000 a portrait. He once dabbled in abstract expressionism, now pooh-poohs it: "I consider myself the avant garde, because nobody sings the song of the upper level of society today. Nobody speaks of the exceptional human being."