Art: The Individualists

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Only a year or so ago, almost every major showing of current U.S. painting concentrated on the abstract expressionists. Either there were more of them, or they painted better, or the museum directors favored them. But now museum directors are branching out. This week Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art opens a new show of artists in their 205 and early 303 that gives a good—and broader—sampling of what the new generation is up to. As in any group show—especially of young painters—the exhibit is uneven; what is most refreshing about it is the extraordinary individualism of its artists.

One of the youngest of the group is William Thomas Wiley, a 22-year-old student at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Something of a beatnik, Wiley was until a year ago "very high on Zen," then suddenly he began concentrating on the everyday things he saw around him. He started painting bits of Americana—striped bunting, an Angel of Liberty, eagles, cops and kids—"because I was almost ashamed I hadn't been seeing these things before." His Fire Crackers Sold Here only suggests the firecracker stand; the rest cracks and blazes like July 4 itself. "I have started with the obvious," says Wiley, "which I hope to evolve into the more subtle language of the things I see and love."

Un-New, Un-Angry. German-born Siegfried Reinhardt of St. Louis has had no formal art training, but by the time he was eleven was intent on becoming a painter. A big (6 ft. 2 in.) and muscular 35, he went through an abstract phase ("esthetic nonsense," he calls it now), has since developed a wholly figurative style, which he boasts is "un-new, un-experi-mental'' and "un-angry." His main subject now, he says, is humanity, seen as the eternal lonely crowd—a torrent of faces and figures that gush out of "strange architectural settings that are unrelated to any recognizable place in the world."

Two of the Whitney artists are Orientals —Ben Kamihira, 35, a Japanese American, and Dale Joe, 32, whose grandparents came from China. Kamihira's figures are as recognizable as Reinhardt's, though he may start a canvas with no more inspiration than a desire to paint a pleasingly faded couch. But, as in his sensual bed room scene Interior or his somber Funeral Coach, his pictures have a way of building into scenes of complexity and grandeur. Dale Joe, on the other hand, produces abstractions as delicate as gossamer. "I may start with a bit of the human body," says he, "and it becomes a landscape, or I start a landscape and there's a human leg in it. Once I began a landscape with trees. Then I destroyed the trees, which destroyed the perspective. It became an aerial scene in the manner of Chinese painting. But there was one arm left in it that threw the whole painting off equilibrium. Everything calm was in that area, so I called it Pocket."