Art: Before Your Very Eyes

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Bitter Footnote. The art world of Europe was a rambunctious place, and when it crossed the Atlantic to join the Armory Show of 1913, it drowned out whatever noise the Americans were making. Yet this week, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington has a well-thought-out show to prove that Americans had plenty of vitality between 1900 and 1940. There were the new open sculptures of Archipenko, the mobiles of Calder, the precisionism of Charles Sheeler, the cubism of Max Weber, and the soaring abstractions of Joseph Stella. But the case of Stanton Macdonald-Wright was something else again, one of those bitter little footnotes to the history of art that serve as a reminder that experimentation and progress are not necessarily the same thing.

The public has an appetite for art that is international, catholic, apparently insatiable, and much more mature than it was a few decades ago. When 150-year-old Colby College in little (pop. 18,000) Waterville, Me., celebrated its centennial, it staged a pageant of eleven scenes, including "The Baptist Ideal," "The Spirit of 1861." and "Sam, a Freed Slave," a tribute to the janitor. In 1963, the idea that came instantly to mind for the sesquicentennial was to put on an exhibition that would demonstrate the role of Maine in the history of U.S. art.

Cruel Coasts. The show—and a complementary book called Maine and Its Role in American Art, 1740-1963 (Viking; $10) —raises doubt that the nation's art could have survived without the help of that state. From Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley to John Singer Sargent and George Bellows, from Maurice Prendergast and Childe Hassam to Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper, from Winslow Homer to John Marin to Andrew Wyeth—artists have taken inspiration from its cruel coasts and rugged landscapes. Marsden Hartley lived there and found his own rough-hewn style admirably suited to it. He saw no refinement, only a primeval bluntness in Maine's rocks, mountains and shore lines. These he painted with a kind of primitive expressionism, for "nativeness is built of such primitive things."

Nativeness, and other kinds of representation, are far and away the people's choice in art, but abstraction has an undying fascination in shows like the Philip Guston retrospective. To see it is to sweat out a painful development: every step that Guston took throughout his professional life involved agonizing doubts and self-reappraisals. Perhaps as a result, his canvases have a feverish, almost tentative look; yet this very nervousness is also their virtue. They give his forms, built up of tiny strokes, a quivering inner life. Compared with Guston, Ben Nicholson's mentholated abstractions are the essence of serenity—simple forms resting gently on planes of fragile color.