For a century. Washington’s Corcoran Gallery has been a staunch patron of American art. This week it marks its 100th birthday with a two-city celebration: a loan exhibition at Manhattan’s Wildenstein Gallery of outstanding pictures drawn from its collection and its regular biennial roundup of contemporary U.S. paintings in Washington. Founder William Wilson Corcoran was a Washington banker so rich and so well connected financially that he could and did underwrite much of the cost of the Mexican War (1846-48). While new-rich American collectors of the 19th century were turning almost exclusively to European art, Corcoran himself chose to concentrate on the new American painters. Stabs and grabs at Europe by later benefactors have filled the Corcoran (on Washington’s 17th Street, near the White House) with surprise items ranging from Sienese altar panels to French impressionists. Yet the heart of the Corcoran is its American collection, to which it adds every year.
The changes those years have wrought in American painting were made dramatically clear by the shows. In Manhattan, the standout exhibits were Seth Eastman’s Lacrosse Playing Among the Sioux Indians and Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo -both brown, spacious, romantic and unabashedly illustrative. The Washington show was long on flat, bright abstractions that would have meant no more to Eastman and Bierstadt than so many Indian blankets. First prize of $2.000 and a gold medal went to Walter Plate, 33, for Hot House, a big, lush bouquet of thick colors, which thus became the Corcoran’s latest acquisition. An ex-marine who studied painting in Paris under the G.I. bill, Plate thinks of himself as “a strictly American painter,” by which he means an abstract expressionist. The $1,500 second prize went, oddly enough, to a bouncy figure painting: Jack Levine’s lighthearted Girls from Fleugel Street.
Weeding through 1,600 entries, Corcoran Director Hermann Warner Williams concluded that the pendulum may at last be swinging back to Levine’s (and Bierstadt’s) way. So far, Williams finds this trend toward more representative subjects only partially successful. Says he: “There is a more or less lost generation of young painters who turned up their noses at the basic disciplines of draftsmanship and just jumped into abstraction. Although they are now trying to use figures, they can’t make the switch because they haven’t had those early disciplines.”
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