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Art

Pasadena Museum
Offers Selections
From 2 Collections

By HENRY J. SELDIS

•Astonishing constrasts and surprising continuities result from the simultaneous display of selections from the Rowan and the Scheyer collections which currently fill the cavernous spaces of the new Pasadena Art Museum.

The exhibition of the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan Collection is a timely gesture of recognition for the enormous amount of time and energy Rowan has spent during the last seven years in bringing vague dreams of a new facility to reality in the museum's presidency that he has just relinquished.

These years have also seen him accumulate some of the largest, most colorful and literally sensational paintings of the 60s whose power is unquestionable, while their sudden inflated monetary value is startling.

Nearly 60 large works selected for the first comprehensive public look at the Rowan Collection are insured for about $1.2 million. Provided today's "blue chip" contemporary American paintings hold their value and Rowan intends to match his role of being a generous lender to being a major donor, this collection may help the museum out of its current financial crisis and establish it as the West Coast's prime modern art resource.

Color as form, scale and impact are the common denominators of yard after yard of Rowan canvases which, for the most part, combine to polished elegance with often convincing poetic aspects. You will find no figure here, only oblique references to the world of appearances and good deal of painterly bombast.

If the collection pays cursory tribute to the pioneers of the new American painting in the 40s and 50s (Gorky, Gottlieb, Still, Diebenkorn), its emphasis is firmly on the colorists of the 60s, ranging from formalists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland to romanticists like Ron Davis and Darby Bannard.

For a collection formed in California, the current selection pays scant attention to West Coast artists who have not been embraced by New York. Furthermore, the insurance values assigned to works by such formidable local talents as Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and Diebenkorn underline the fact that they have not yet been accepted on the international all-star team, perhaps for lack of a local promoter of New Yorker Leo Castelli's immense cleverness.

What is most impressive about the Rowan display is his collector's insistence on buying a number of painters in depth, so that the current exhibition includes small but revealing one-man shows by Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ron Davis, Morris Louis and Jules Olitski. Non-objective, focused-on-color, each in their own individual and influential manner, these artists have little if anything in common with the Pop artists Rowan collected earlier, although Roy Lichtenstein's magnum opus "Temple of Apollo" and the quintessential example of his "cartoon" period "Trigger Finger" are easily among the most striking works on view. 

For me the single most rewarding experience of several hours wandering through the corridors of this weird building was the contemplation of a wall of seven Morris Louis canvases brilliantly demonstrating the haunting and altogether personal lyricism developed by this astonishing artist during his all-too-brief career.

Ron Davis' plastic paintings (as I prefer to think of them) are as stimulating as Louis' stained canvases are soothing and contemplative. His bursts of fragmented color and his continued involvement in mathematical aspects of perspective are perhaps most dramatically expressed in his columnar "four-Fold" work, while his ephemeral propensities are best seen in "Tri-Plane," the most recent work shown. Although Davis has not yet become an art celebrity like Stella, his work is at least as inventive and as totally personal as the basically theatrical

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Sketch for "Deluge" by Wassily Kandinsky is one of Scheyer Collections works exhibited at Pasadena Museum.

Stella canvases shown here.

Like Stella, Noland's power is essentially cerebral and classicist in nature. His paintings here rely for their considerable emotive power entirely on their color structure. But it is Jules Olitski who carries on the atmospheric nuances of Morris and goes beyond his in such evocative works as "Juice" and "Tender Boogus."

Among the very few lesser known artists in the Rowan selections, Darby Barnard manages to stand up very well among the celebrities with his low-keyed, subtly colored, land-and-skyscape derived canvases which once more underline the basically romantic nature of the entire collection.

For the most part the Rowan paintings offer immediate and not readily forgotten encounters with color and scale. In many instances they represent the preference of the 60s for sensate, direct but one-level experience with an extraordinary objects often created out of a search for the kind of detachment thought of as "cool".

The connection that the Gorky, the De Kooning, the Still and the Diebenkorn provide to Kandinsky's prophetic 1912 "Deluge" in the Galka Scheyer Collection is a bridge toward the kind of painting that was made to be experienced on many levels and was therefore multifaceted.

There is a sportive air to Rowan's collecting patterns like a search for thoroughbreds touted highly by the experts. But since these paintings must have been assembled for public rather than private display, the selling of an Andy Warhol might have risen 200% in value since purchased and the use of the proceeds to buy still another "comer" should en-

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"Alpha Epsilon, 1961," by Morris Louis is on display at the Pasadena Art Museum.

able Pasadena Art Museum visitors to keep in touch with those artists who have just made it big, as long as Rowan continues to store and display his major possessions there. Meanwhile, works by relatively lesser known artists in this collection may come to be regarded as some kind of barometer.

If Rowan's buying sprees usually focus on half a dozen artists, Galka Scheyer's extraordinary activities as a collector and agent for Klee, Jawkensky, Feininger and Kandinsky led her not only to promote the "Blue Four" in California half a century ago but also to coin the very name that binds them together.

To look at a wall of Jawlensky portraits going back to 1911, with their audacious use of arbitrary color and their foreshadowing his mask-like, symbolic, occult heads is to realize that a confrontation with these works at the time of their origin must have been even more startling than the initial encounter today's Pasadena Art Museum visitor might with a roomfull of Stella's overwhelming canvases.

But in Jawlensky as in the other three whose work make up the bequest which is germinal to the museum's development as the major modern art resource in Southern California, one finds exactly that kind of philosophical, extrapictorial, basically humanistic concern so irrelevant to most artist-performers of the moment.

Less is not necessarily more. Enormous scale need not equate with emotional intensity. To compare Paul Klee's watercolor painting "Pflantzensamen" (Plantseeds) with Jules Olitski's acrylic canvas "Juice" substantiates such conclusions.