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This led him to think of European war brides and finally the wedding dress. The flight of association might just as well have .started with the dress and gone the other way. Kamihira has an eerie ability to fill his carefully composed interiors with conflicting emotions. The painting evokes such heavy sadness that the white satin becomes not a dress for a bride but a robe for a sacrifice. Few artists use pure stagecraft more effectively.
The same qualities—a fascination with texture and a gift for drama—are in Ralph Borge's painting of the Negro male and white female nudes. Borge's chief device is paradox: "The heightened attention to realism casts a spell of logic about the painting which it does not really have." If there is one thing the figurative artists have in common, it is a reverence for mystery, and Borge uses his precise craftsmanship to achieve the exact opposite of precision. What are those two people doing in that field? Why does the mirror cast no reflection? Why is the tombstone turned into a scarecrow? "If I knew the answers," says Borge, "I would be Norman Rockwell. He can leave nothing to the imagination." Inevitably the exhibition has its share of horrors, and occasionally the figure is scarcely visible at all. In one apparent abstraction, the figure turns out to be a piece of back seen from the shoulder blades to the buttocks. There are times, too, when the artists seem more anxious to shock than produce a work of art. Yet the range is the important thing—from a charming little girl by Jean Seidenberg to a grizzly Mussolini hanging by his heels, from a regally wrinkled Elsa Maxwell by Rene Bouche to a witty, wispy Miss New Jersey I by Larry Rivers to a scrofulous Seated Boxer I by Leon Golub. At times the human figure is shamelessly exploited, but the net effect of the show is one of exhilaration. Today's figurative painters are not so much concerned with the human body as with saying something about human life.