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Art/Barbara Rose 
The Best Mid Western Museum in New York? 

"...Two current retrospectives at the Whitney prove that it has come a long way since the days of Ash Can School...."

There used to be a standing art-world joke that Whitney was the best Mid-Western museum in New York. Slowly, over the past few years, this has been changing. Two current retrospectives-of veteran New York painter Lee Kranser (through 1/6/74) and 36 year-old geometric color-field abstractionist Larry Zox (through 1/15/74)- prove that the Whitney has come a long way since Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became the patroness of the Ash Can School. 

Lee Krasner's retrospective is both long overdue and unnecessarily limited to large works done since 1951. The show is impressive and coherent, but overlooks her historic importance as one of the seminal forces among the Abstract Expressionists. An abstract painter since the thirties, she was among the first to turn her eyes from American Scene painting to take a good long look at Picasso and Matisse: and undoubtedly her interest and enthusiasm helped convince a number of her contemporaries of the hegemony of French art. It is interesting to note that she was painting Cubist abstractions at a time when her future husband, Jackson Pollock, still was a follower of Thomas Hart Benton. One misses not only these early efforts, but especially the fine "little image" paintings of the late forties which were among the first "all-over" action paintings. One also regrets that only one of her 1955 collage paintings-a very original series of high color works made from scraps of rejected paintings-is included. Entitled Stretched Yellow, it directly points to Krasner's works of the seventies, in which loose gestural paintings has been tightened up to form flat shapes with defined contours. Despite a gradual stylistic evolution, culminating in the exhilarating expanse of Mediterranean, certain features remain constant in Krasner's works. One of these is a sense of rhythm, particularly as expressed by large swinging arcs: another is an interest in pure color for its own sake. Other constants include a determination to create abstract art that signifies, alluding to natural forms or sometimes to shapes reminiscent of archetypical pictograms. Her latest works, 

[[image]] 
Lee Krasner's "Seasons[[?]]," 1957, at the Whitney Museum. 

statelier and more majestic than earlier energetic, calligraphic paintings, further synthesizes these elements.

Of a generation that rebelled against the gestural drawing of Abstract Expressionism, Larry Zox is one of the most solid artists who matured in the shadow of the greats. I remember how flat his paintings looked at first: but now it seems that the flatness was relative to a context of illusionistic painting. Now one sees much more spatial interplay, created through color interactions and abreacted perspective, but within a space that is sliver-thin even when compared with the shallow space of Cubism. Scale, space, and color are more closely related in Zox's work to mural than to easel painting, but a quixotic expressiveness redeems them from bland decorativeness-the trap for any geometric artist. I like less the series of virtually monochrome paintings with marginal borders that seem a capitulation to the vogue for Olitskitype empty-center formats. 

Helen Frankenthaler's new paintings at Andre Emmerich (4) East 57th Street, through 12/5) are a culmination of her recent investigations of the relationship of drawing to color, and of the capacity of curving, winding, and bending lines to create an infinitely ambiguous abstract space. Although some of the paintings are more subdued, there is a Venetian lushness to the giant twenty-foot-long Moveable Blue Feast, a spreading field of blue framed by contrasting 

[[image]] 
Lee Krasner's "Seasons," 1957, at the Whitney Museum. 

warm, yellows and ochers. Shapes are generally eschewed for a rolling flow of changeable color, shading off into transparent washes modulated with an extraordinary delicacy of touch. Few artists today are involved with giving the public pleasures; in her capacity to invent a spacious, light-filled world absolutely antithetical to the narrow confines, both real and imaginary, that hem us in, Frankenthaler is an exceptional artist, her current show a bright respite from a dim time. 

At William Zierler Gallery (956 Madison Avenue, through 12/15) Stephen Greene is exhibiting paintings recently done in Rome that have a new clarity and calmness. Drawing is still used to create an indeterminate, fluctuating space, but Surrealistic anatomical allusions have been purged in favor of purer, less angst-ridden vision. Roman colors-ocher, terra cotta, sienna-and Roman light pervade these superbly well-made paintings. 

Two recent exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and constructions by Dada pioneer Hesse Richter ran concurrently at the Betty Parsons and the Denise Rene galleries. New works at Betty Parsons (24 West 57th Street) showed Richter to have kept up admirably with the times; early Expressionist paintings, antiwar Dada drawings and visionary portraits, and scroll paintings at Denise Rene (6 West 57th Street) revealed Richter's Roots. 

102 New York