Art: The Younger Generation

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¶Helen Frankenthaler. 28, well-to-do Bennington College graduate ('49), a standout exhibitor in all three shows who ranks high with the elder Abstract Expressionists as one of the few painters to follow in their wake, manages to give her intensely lyric, free-flow paintings a recognizably personal stamp. Up to using anything from a paint pot to her foot to gain her effects, she occasionally relaxes by switching to a meticulous landscape or realistic self-portrait. Says Painter Frankenthaler of her abstract work, "I just start to see what happens. You want clues? There are no clues. No idea makes a picture good or bad."

¶John Levee, 32, a talented new expatriate Paris painter who (along with Sam Francis, 33, and Paul Jenkins, 33) has made a name for himself abroad, was picked for both the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art shows (see overleaf). A U.S. Air Force officer during World War II, Levee went to Paris to study painting on the G.I. bill. First registered at the Academic Julian, he was nearly thrown out for flouting academic standards, wound up sharing the school's Grand Prix second prize with his Parisian wife. Approaching abstraction via Cezanne and the Cubists, Levee also shows the influence of his French contemporaries Pierre Soulages and the late Nicolas de Stael. but now feels his painting is becoming less French, more American, "less architectural, less constructed, more organic."

¶Rosemarie Beck, 33, wife of fledgling Novelist Robert Phelps and mother of an eight-year-old son, is admired for her painterly glazes and sensitive, careful technique. Her House of the Sun—No. 3 (opposite), now at the Whitney, was done over a three-to-five-month period, can be viewed with interest from any direction (for the position in which Painter Beck painted it, rotate page one-quarter turn to the left). Her goal, to achieve "the effect of a new light," bound in from all directions, is ambitious, but she says: "The older generation had the real terror. They took the real risks. They had to break through. We are a generation of magpies. We are not taking the risks the way they did, and we are deceitful if we say that we are."