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Denver-born Robert Beauchamp, 38, studied under Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, but in 1953 returned to the figure. "It was an emotional thing," he says. "I felt abstract art was too remote from immediate life, that I had to wear blinkers when I walked out onto the street." His use of color goes back to the German expressionists ("I reverted to what had preceded Hofmann"), but the fantasy is all Beauchamp. His creatures crouch or dance in junglelike settings, seem often to be engaged in some sort of orgy. Beauchamp is unable to explain why his fantasy takes the direction it does.
Like the abstract expressionists, he lets his paintings have a life of their own.
Jules Kirschenbaum, 32, and his Latvian-born wife, Cornelis Ruhtenberg, had both always painted realistically, though she once tried abstraction ("It seemed awfully easy"). Painter Ruhtenberg likes to show "figures against space, to get figures against a flat background without making perspective." In Potiphar's Wife (see overleaf), the running man balances the seated figure: "The problem was to have a contained picture, yet have movement." In Kirschenbaum's Sleeping Figures, the problem was to achieve "the dreamlike qualities of everything becoming different yet clear." The fact that everything in the lush arabesque is not really clear produces a frustrating ambiguity, but the ambiguity is haunting, too, like the ambiguity of dreams.
Opposite Directions. At first glance, it might seem as if Jacob Landau, 44, had come out of the same school as Robert Broderson, 41. In both Cinna the Poet (overleaf) and New Myth-Mine Disaster (last color page), the tortured figures look as if they were about to be torn apart.
But the two artists take entirely different approaches to their work. Broderson, who learned much from painting abstractions —"surfaces, various ways of using paint and the like"—starts a picture with only the vaguest idea in mind, lets it evolve on the canvas, a characteristic of action painters. Landau's Cinna was inspired partly by the Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar and partly by the brutality of Naziism in World War II. While many of the new figurative painters tend to use the figure as just another object or form, Landau is brave enough to admit to being concerned with "the condition of man." Ben Kamihira (overleaf), Joseph Hirsch and Ralph Borge (last page) do not use distortion to achieve a sense of drama; their paintings rely more on a subtle or unexpected arrangement of the figures and objects. Hirsch's Coronation had its origins in certain impressions of World War II—of white doctors treating dark-skinned natives and Negro medics caring for white G.I.s. This compassion between the races has long fascinated Hirsch, and his paintings tend to have a religious overtone. The hand swabbing the boxer's brow is to Hirsch almost as much the focal point of the painting as the boxer himself. Hirsch likens it to a kind of benediction.
Conflicting Emotions. Kamihira's Wedding Dress began with a childhood memory of his mother, a Japanese immigrant.