Art: Stark Young, Painter

"I who know the smallness of my voice and the tiny stink of all our journalistic voices repeated wonder if any words of mine could matter much. . . ."

This modest if rhetorical utterance is characteristic of florid, balding, loquacious Stark Young, who has been a discerning critic of art and the theater (in the New Republic and elsewhere) for some 20 years. Stark Young is known also as a best-selling novelist (So Red The Rose), a poet, a playwright, a translator of plays and a lecturer. Last week he made a firm bid to be known as...