Painting: The Flip Side

The precision of the small has delighted men through the ages. French scribes charmed medieval dukes with their illuminated books of hours. Persian miniaturists captivated jaded sultans with their courtly fables of princess and peri. Dissolute French aristocrats wore miniature portraits of their mistresses in medallions around their necks.

Even now, while the big names in painting fill museum walls with mammoth abstractions, the practitioners of the minuscule thrive quietly.

Tiny paintings are intrinsically no more interesting than large ones. The danger that the behemoths run is of be coming bombastic; midgets must combat a tendency to seem cloyingly cute. Since what counts, however, is not an artist's limitations but how successfully he transcends them, both can hope for im mortality. Indeed, they are flip sides of the same coin: both rely on scale to create an effect.

Some gifted precisionists acknowledge this kinship with tongue in cheek.

"I'm just as serious about having my paintings not mean anything as abstractionists are about having theirs mean something," says Jean Jones Jackson, a Connecticut matron who taught herself to draw during a bout with TB 15 years ago. "I can't bear anything symbolic." Jackson protests that she paints only small pictures because her technique is too poor to allow her to paint big ones. In fact, her pettiness is a positive dimension, making what might otherwise be a fairly conventional mix of Rene Magritte and Grandma Moses seem witty, bizarre and remote.

Bittersweet Taste. Manhattan's Robert Kulicke, 45, has studied even more closely the gargantuan canvases of the abstract expressionists; he frames them.

Well-known in the art business, Kulicke has put rims 'around hundreds of Pollocks, Klines, Newmans, Frankenthalers and Motherwells. For these modernists, he developed the "Kulicke frame" — a simple, tasteful band of polished aluminum. For his frames he won a design award last month from the American Institute of Interior Designers.

Yet when Kulicke sits down to paint, he produces minute still lifes in a nostalgic, bittersweet style that he calls "more 17th century than 20th."

His modesty should not be taken too literally. As a framemaker, he concedes that his business is taste. By that he means suiting his style to that of the painting he works with. As an artist, though, he must combat the instinct to be tasteful. "Taste," he argues, "is created by artists who don't have taste. It is through their convictions that they create the taste of other people." Thus, he refuses to frame his own pictures. "If my pictures are going to live," he says, "maybe the next generation will find a sympathetic way to frame them."