Art: The Younger Generation

What comes after abstraction? The question is probably still premature, but for trend-sifters who look to the younger generation for clues. Manhattan this week offers possibilities by the dozen. The Whitney Museum of American Art, in its first "Young America" show, is displaying 121 works by 30 artists under 35; the Museum of Modern Art, in its "Recent American Acquisitions," includes works by some two dozen younger painters; the Jewish Museum will open its first younger-artist group show with 58 works by 23 artists developing the theme, "The New York School—Second Generation."

Main fact to emerge is that the shock treatment of the past abstract expressionist decade is giving way to gentler, more lyric works, with a pronounced shift back toward nature. But with this shift the artists are still clinging tenaciously to most of the impassioned painting discoveries and new-found techniques of the older abstractionists. Second and less heartening conclusion is that the horde of painters spawned by the G.I. bill and flourishing art schools has served mainly to swell the ranks of the second-raters, produced only a handful of individual talents.

The result is a cross-rip of conflicting trends, awash with the froth and flotsam of derivative mannerisms and borrowed techniques, with only here and there a standout figure combining endurance, freshness and individual talent. Among those whose work indicates that they bear watching:

¶Wolf Kahn, 30, who first studied with Manhattan's leading abstractionist mentor, Hans Hofmann, then on his own switched to realistic pastels, now paints in a lyric, impressionist style that earns him a place among the Museum of Modern Art's new acquisitions. For his Late Afternoon (opposite), painted last summer in Provincetown, Mass., Kahn derived his inspiration from both the setting and his pretty model, Fellow Artist Emily Mason. He says of the completed work: "I tried to express tranquillity and contentment with overall lightness of tones, general vertical composition and subdued, dancing brush strokes."*

¶Jan Muller, 34, German-born painter who came to the U.S. in 1941, is another Hans Hofmann pupil who still sticks by his abstract teacher's general principles but feels, "Abstract art is too esoteric. The image gives one a wider sense of communication." Now hitting his stride. Muller appears in all three museum shows. His Of This Time, Of That Place (opposite) at the Whitney is a large-scale (4 ft. by 8 ft.) canvas with looming white nudes set against a luxuriant patchwork landscape that draws its theme from Goethe's Erlkönig.

¶Robert Andrew Parker, 29, lanky father of four, has made a brilliant end run that skirts nearly all the technical thrashing and rehashing that bedevil Manhattan painters. His subjects range from such imaginary portraits as King Gustave of Sweden Tatting to East Riding of Yorkshire Yeomanry Disembarking from H.M.S. Cressy , the fourth in a series of watercolors which sprang from the war games that Parker, a lead-soldier enthusiast, played until recently on the mudflat at suburban Mamaroneck, N.Y. Parker's drenched watercolors. done on rolls of plain shelf paper, now appear in the collections of both the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.