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But unlike the habitués of Wall Street, those of 57th Street (and of the East 60s and "70s, to which many galleries have recently migrated) are usually just looking. With a good visual memory and a will for the work, any looker can build a splendid art museum in his own mind—where feet never tire and the lighting is good. Among New York's candidates for such imaginary museums this week were the works shown on these pages. Their quality (and lack of it), as well as their extraordinary range, were typical of the New York art world at midseason.
Mystic & Plastic
William Blake's sketch of a thief in the toils of a serpent was included in a collection of old masters' drawings at the Durlacher Gallery. It shows the British mystic at his most frightening. Blake learned Italian in old age simply to read Dante, illustrated The Divine Comedy both to complement and criticize Dante's philosophy. For Blake, hell was on earth, not in the afterworld, but still he found it real enough. In Blake's drawing of Brunelleschi, the attacking serpent is not so much an infernal punishment for Brunelleschi's thieveries as a symbol of the envy that made him a thief. The lightly sketched figure is lead-heavy with hatred, and seems sagging into serpentnature.
The Draped Reclining Figure by a contemporary Briton, Henry Moore, was part of a Moore show at the Curt Valentin Gallery. Moore, as renowned in his own lifetime as Blake was scorned in his, received the usual all-out praise from Manhattan critics. The New York Times's Howard Devree went so far as to write that "the figures stand or sit or lie like members of some ancient race of prototypes of man, self-contained and with vision that goes out over larger areas of experience than those of mortals, and with a kind of wintry" courage that is not mere passive resignation. Moore's rhythms are those of earth itself." Noninitiates might retort that Moore's sculptures look more subhuman than superhuman. Granting its plastic power—its dramatic impact as a shape—his Draped Reclining Figure sadly lacks the sympathy with which Blake portrayed all human beings. It is like a lump trying to shake off a nightmare, and perhaps rise to human nature.
Two Kinds of Cold
Josef Albers' Homage to the Square: "Ascending," at the brand-new Whitney Museum on 54th Street, looks almost identical in composition with the squares Albers has been painting for some time. A brilliant teacher (and chairman of Yale University's Department of Design), Albers considers all his own work experimental. By painting squares within squares of varying colors, he achieves an endless variety of odd, beautiful and sometimes disturbing effects. "I push my colors," he explains soberly. "I want to push a green so it looks red." When students complain that to "push" colors Albers limits himself to the coldly unemotional, the artist replies with a thin smile that "emotions are usually prejudices."