Still Able to Surprise

Of all the hundreds of exhibitions put together by the curators of the Great American art boom (circa 1962-73), not one tried to give an account of what was being painted in Europe. The reason, as everyone "knew," was that European art no longer mattered. Paris was over; London, a village; only New York had a hammer lock on history. This eminently questionable belief, fathered by chauvinism and fed by the largest promotional apparatus in the history of art, lay at the root of American art politics in the '60s and formed the taste of a generation of museumgoers. Now the retreat is on. An exhibition called "European Painting in the '70s" opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is the first show of its kind to appear in an American museum since, believe it or not, 1959. Ably organized by Curator Maurice Tuchman, it consists of 65 paintings by 16 artists. The show will travel to the St. Louis Art Museum in the spring of 1976, and to the Elvehjem Art Center in Madison, Wis., in the summer—but not to New York.

It is, of course, impossible to find 16 artists who could represent the full range of style and preoccupation in European art, so Tuchman has restricted his choice mainly to figurative paintings by "loners"—artists who, for one reason or another, have not closely identified themselves with particular groups or movements. Some of the work is familiar to a U.S. audience: the sumptuous paranoia of Francis Bacon's images (TIME, April 7) basking like altarpieces behind their glittering shields of glass and gold leaf; the cool, infrangible poise of David Hockney's still lifes and portraits. Pierre Alechinsky, the Belgian painter, is represented by a group of delectably complex, exuberant paintings, swarming with organic life like microscope slides rendered in calligraphy. There is a group of Sobreteixims by the 82-year-old Joan Miro, hangings woven from thick knotted clumps of rope, charred and then painted with undiminished vitality.

At the other extreme, some of the artists are completely unknown in the U.S.: for example, a Dutch eccentric named Anton Heyboer, who lives with three women in a small dark barn north of Amsterdam and, the catalogue gravely assures us, "is timeless and unconscious, like an animal." Heyboer's life may have the gray neuralgic minimality of a character in Beckett, and the paintings—schematic outline figures scrawled on a white ground—look negligible. Quite different is the work of a Frenchman, Jean-Olivier Hucleux, who has developed a technique of such extreme verisimilitude as to make nearly all U.S. photo-realism seem clumsy and generalized. His favorite subject is, lit erally, nature morte: French graveyards, with their raked gravel, their cakes of black granite brought to a patent-leather gloss, their iconography of morose kitsch. Hucleux paints them down to the last molecule and the result is a form of trompe l'oeil that contrives to be both meditative and irritating, done with a delicacy of touch that defies analysis.