Art: NEW WORLDS OF THE NEW WORLD

CUSSING in a dozen tongues, workmen sweated last week in steamy Venice to finish modern art's biggest Babel. By week's end Venice's biennial roundup of contemporary painting and sculpture, due to open this week, had installed only a quarter of the nearly 6,000 paintings and sculptures sent in from 34 countries (including Russia for the first time since 1934). Only at the prim brick American Pavilion did contentment reign. Brisk, brusque Katharine Kuh, curator of modern painting at Chicago's Art Institute, had the U.S. contribution all up and dusted. It made a striking show.

Of all the countries exhibiting at Venice's Biennale, the U.S.alone gets by without government sponsorship. By custom, American museums have done the selecting, and private benefactors the financing of the U.S. entries. This year Chicago Financier and Art Patron Arnold Maremont picked up the check, and Katharine Kuh picked out the pictures. Her theme: "American Artists Paint the City."

The theme, illustrated by 46 widely ranging examples, could hardly have been better chosen. As American cities have grown steadily bigger and more weirdly beautiful, the nation's artists have turned increasingly from landscape to cityscape. Curator Kuh blurred her point occasionally by including abstractions from the hands of some artists, e.g., Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, which bore no relation to any city unless it was the City of Dreadful Night. But her top choices more than made up for that.

Along with such classics as Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning and Reginald Marsh's Holy Name Mission, Mark Tobey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Lee Gatch in particular had succeeded in seizing the spirit of the New World's new worlds (opposite). In their vision of the city, they found something new to conjure with: the starry, neon-lit quality of urban America as it shows itself by night. They portrayed not actual locations so much as vast shadowlands humming with lights and movements. All three pictured truths about the American city which had never been put on canvas before.