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[[Note]] May 3, 1959 [[Note]]

NEW YORK HERALD TRI [[?]]

Art: Exotic Fare

Japan, Mexico and Far North Provide Week's New Exhibits

By EMILY GENAUER

I was reading the other night in Suzuki's newly published, revised "Zen and Japanese Culture" (Oh, the homework a critic must do these days in order to keep up with the experiments of artists and the researches of art scholars!). It was in preparation for reviewing three new exhibitions of recent Zen-inspired Japanese painting and sculpture, plus one of work by the noted Japanese-American sculpture, Isamu Noguchi, who is also a practitioner of Zen Buddhism.

Other new fare offered about town in this most unusual week was no less exotic; a show, for instance, of Pre-Columbian ceramics (dating from 2,000 B.C. to 1521 A.D.) called "Venus in America," and one of contemporary stone carvings by Eskimos of the Canadian East Arctic.

Just how I was going to deal with their relationship - and that a formal relationship exists will be instantly clear to anyone who sees the shows - was troubling me deeply until I came, in the book on Zen, on a passage telling of a novice monk who went to a great Zen master for lessons and after a while, spoke his disappointment at not receiving any.

The master replied, "Since your arrival I have ever been giving you lessons on the matter of Zen discipline. When you bring me a cup of tea in the morning, I take it; when you serve me a meal, I accept it; when you bow to me, I return it with a nod. How else do you expect to be taught in the mental discipline of Zen?"

And when the pupil hung his face for a while, pondering the puzzling words of the master, the latter said, "If you want to see, see right at once. When you begin to think, you miss the point."

A Lesson From Zen

So, this week, I take my lesson from Zen, and pass it on. The way to approach the new art exhibitions is to accept them, to "see" them right at once, and not think too much beyond what one sees. Otherwise one's apt to get lost in a great archaeological and sociological area scholars haven't themselves charted. Not here - not anywhere, yet - will you find a final explanation for the fact that Tarascan terra cotta figures fashioned in western Mexico in the period from 600 to 900 A.D. and on exhibition in the pre-Columbian "Venus" show at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, are so similar to the Haniwa terra cotta figures fashioned in Japan around three centuries earlier, which Noguchi, in New York for his showing at the Stable Gallery, told me the other day, have been an influence on him. But then Noguchi also says he's learned much from Brancusi (very evident in the exhibition), and then goes on to explain that he's really more Greek than Japanese anyway, and that Brancusi derived from the Greeks, too, and that of course he means that Cycladic Greeks of the period around 2,500 B.C., not the classic Greeks.

And it's as true as it sounds complicated. There is a remarkable affinity between the mystical, contemplative, highly stylized, tightly contained, Cycladic marble idols (the Metropolitan Museum occasionally has some on display), and the austere geometric conventions of Brancusi, and the ritualistic quality and formal simplifications of Noguchi and the dynamic little pre-Columbian figurines, and the simpler of the carvings by untaught Eskimos from the far north, on exhibition at the parish house of St. James Episcopal Church. And we would, as the Zen master said, perhaps do better to see it "right at once," than to think about the why of it, or theorize on the greater kinship modern sculptors feel with primitive arts propitiating fearsome, unknown natural forces, than with classic, naturalistic art glorifying the human figure.

Noguchi Solo

So then, let's look in on the Noguchi show at the Stable Gallery forgetting parallels and influences, although not intention.  Noguchi's concern, when he carves his delicately sensuous tall, columnar forms hollowed out a bit here, perhaps and slightly swelling there, or his shapes that vaguely suggest a bird, or a torso, is with forms in space.  They are not, he insists, abstractions, although they rarely represent identifiable objects.  They have to do with concepts of peace, stillness; arrival, departure, continuity.  They are beautiful in surface, most subtly modeled for all their forthrightness of shape and occasional ruggedness of material.  They are as intense as they are enigmatic, utterly sophisticated, and at the same time disarmingly pure.
Noguchi's great disappointment is that he has so often been commissioned to devise sculpture for  use in architecture, and that his projects have rarely been executed.  A design he did for the Lever House plaza at Park Avenue and 53rd St. is seen in the show in half-size models. It is difficult to imagine how the project would actually look constructed.  But there can't be any question that form-wise, as the boys in that part of town say, his concept would be an island of serenity in the Park Avenue maelstrom.  Whether popular reaction would permit it to remain so, is another question.
So quickly do aesthetic currents flow these days between old art and new, and from one part of the world to another, that it is difficult to know where to place a man.  Sofu Teshigahara, for example, a Japanese sculptor making his American debut at the Martha Jackson Gallery, suggests in some of his carved wood abstractions encased in or studded with metal, the influence of Henry Moore, Jacques Lipchitz and even, especially in the spikey piece called "Momo," Noguchi himself in that earlier phase when he did the decor and costumes for the ballet "Orpheus."
But then Moore and Lipchitz themselves admit to having been influenced by the art of Asia, so that leaves us nowhere, except where the Zen master say we ought to be-simply seeing.  What we see in Teshigahara's show is a series of intricate, gnarled, tense, perforated constructions almost baroque in comparison with the contemplative stillness of the present-day Noguchi.  It is this nervousness, this writhing, churning quality, that suggests that Teshigahara has looked to the West rather than to his native Orient.

Sugai Shown
Another contemporary Japanese artist, the painter Kumi Sugai, is being exhibited for the first time in America at the Kootz Gallery, Sugai paints large, bold shapes very like Japanese calligraphic characters which, indeed,they may be, although they seem somewhat simpler in form. They're done with broad sweeps of the brush trailing black pigment thinly across a background of textured gray, or tan, or blue. They're mysterious constructions somewhat suggesting a labyrinth, but really defying intellectual analysis. In them one feels creative energy, and a certain bold rhythm.  
  But the essence of Sugai's work strikes me as ascetic rather than aesthetic. He employs symbols that do not communicate their meaning to me, shapes I find only moderately interesting, color that is rewarding in only two or three works. ("Raishin,"for example, and "Kabuki"). And yet he has his admirers. I was enormously interested to note from the exhibition catalogue that most of the canvasses on view had been loaned by well-known New Yorkers so actively involved in the city's legal, technical and financial life one would have thought an art as esoteric and metaphysical as this, and as far removed from their usual processes of ratiocination, would have little appeal. I am, obviously wrong, unless his ad-

[[photo]] [[caption]] Eski Provocative parallels and of the week (see story at exhibition of contempora [[/caption]]

mirers have adopted, at least in their collecting activities, the Zen precept of seeing, not thinking.
  So quickly were the stone sculptures by Eskimos on exhibit at St. James Church being snatched up by eager collectors this week that comments on the display as I saw it may by this time no longer apply. Because there is considerable variation in quality among the works on view, and the best of them were going fast (the show is a benefit for the Episcopal and Anglican Churches' work among the Eskimos).
All are small, intensely animated carvings by wholly untrained Eskimo craftsmen depicting their daily activities (hunting and fishing, mostly). The most interesting by far are those which are least sophisticated and, indeed, most like the ancient carvings by the Eskimos' forebears that have been dug up in Manitoba. The ancient pieces are in many respects similar to just those Cycladic marbles and to certain Oriental and pre-Columbian stone carvings already mentioned, bespeaking, surely, the origin of the Eskimo on the Asiatic continent which anthropologists generally accept. The finest of the modern works preserve to a certain extent the early pieces' rude strength, their stylization almost to the point of abstraction, their exaggerated rhythms of the line and mass. Particularly is this true of some carvings made in the Cape Dorset area around Baffin Island, and some, made by an Eskimo named Innukpuk in the Port Harrison district on the East Coast of Hudson Bay. 
Regrettably, the outside world seems to be having its influence on the Eskimos. Their sculpture too often now tends to be more realistic, to take on a superficially interesting genre character. Their new skill in modeling is costing their work its original strong expressiveness. 

[[image[[ An exhibition of "ART [[/image]]

Varied One-Man Shows
  After all the metaphysical, intensity filling galleries around town at the moment it's singularly pleasant to come on the show of paintings by the Italian artist Gentilini, at the John Heller Gallery. Gentling takes a cathedral facade, simplifies it to a linear pattern of circles and squares, sets in front of it people who are essentially robots, mixes his pigment with sand, so he has a fresco-like surface- and finishes with compositions of great ingenuity, charm and freshness. Genitilini's is a decorative art, perhaps, but it is entirely personal and thoroughly ingratiating. 
 John Gutman, exhibiting recent works at the Collectors' Gallery, is another artist who looks on the world not as a profound enigma but as a source of lively kaleidoscopic patterns he uses as a scaffolding for his engaging pictures. The facades of houses become a flat labyrinth of sharply angular patterns. A groups of Indians in Mexico are transformed into a lively column of intricate calligraphy. Gutman's is a precise, calculated idiom but with it he still paints pictures that have sparkle, freshness and individuality.  
E.G.