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34  The New York Times, Thursday, February 27, 1969

Negroe's Art Is What's In Just Now
By Grace Glueck

 "Were a trend like pop and op," Benny Andrews, a negro artist, asays with a shrug. "We're the latest movement. Of course, like the others, we may be over in a year or two."
 If the number of group shows of work by black artists is any indication, Mr. Andrews is right about the trend. Only a few years ago, "segregated" black exhibitions were as scarce on the white art circuit as group shows of work by Hungarians.
 But with the rise of black consciousness - and whites' recognition of it - such shows have become de riguer with museums, galleries and even corporations, all of whom are rushing to mount them.
 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, currently presenting the controversial ethnic-environmental show "Harlem on My Mind," is exploring the possibility of a major survey in 1971 of Negro art in America.
 The rash of "black" exhibitions also include "30 Contemporary Black Artists," a current traveling show organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in collaboration with Ruder & Finn, the Manhattan public relations concern; "Eclipse," a show of paintings and drawings by the Committee for Black Artists, on view this month at New York university's Loeb Student Center; the reent "1969: 12 Afro-American Artists" at the Lee Nordness Galleries in New York and "Eight Plus Eight," a mixed black and white show mounted last month at the Riverside Museum.

Not Flattering to Some
 While some Negro artists participate in the shows quite willingly, many regard them as simply an attempt to get on the bandwagon.
 "It's not flattering to be in a black show," says Raymond Saunders, a painter who recently had a one-man exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, 18 East 67th Street. "When you get into the bag of calling it Negro art, it's a euphemism for second-class."
 But Mr. Andrews takes a different view:  "I've been bombarded to exhibit because I'm black," he says. "People call me from, say, the Teaneck Library, and report they're having a black art show. But if that sort of thing helps the work get exposed and gives black artists some encouragement, I'm not against it.
 "I'm convinced that in two years, people will get tired of it. Then there'll be fallout - the artists who are good."
 Responding to the same esthetic currents as whites, many black artists produce work that has no Negro "identity." These include such sculptors and constructionists as Tom Lloyd, Richard Hunt and Dan Johnson and the painters Norman Lewis, Sam Gilliam Jr., Richard Mayew and Felrath Hines.
 Other artists, like Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Charles White, limn "black" subjects - the substance of their environment, current or remembered. Still others - Mr. Andrews, Mr. Saunders, Reggie Gammon - turn out social commentary that often has a polemical edge.
 Mr. Bearden, a sort of elder statesman in the Harlem cultural community, believes i the "uniqueness" of the black artist's experience, and its translation into art.

'Absent' in Other Artists
 And in a recent symposium at the metropolitan Museum of Art called "the Black Artist in America," Hale Woodruff, a well-known painter and teacher, said:
 "I do think there is something found in the works of the black artist that is absent in the art of other people. Langston Hughes [the late poet] used to define this as coming from the folkways, from the special quality that we as black people have."
 On the other hand, Dan Johnson, an artist from the West Coast, who deals with the action of light on highly abstract forms, does not buy the idea of "Negro art."
 "There are a few of us out here who have stepped beyond Negritude," he says. "Just to put a show of artists together without direction or esthetic, to prove they can make pictures? I don't want to be approached on that level. I prefer the esthetic velvet hammer. No one would attack Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk of Miles Davis because they don't verbalize their blackness."
 Many black artist whose subject matter is abstract, confess to a certain ambivalence. They are often torn between the freedom they exercise as artists and the pressure they feel to convey their racial experience.
 Vivian Browne, a young Negro painter who earns her living as an acting supervisor of art for the Board of Education, says:
 "to be an artist is very difficult, for a white or a black person. But if you have another thing against you, it's compounded. The social content is part of every black artist, and it has to come out. I do unpleasant, negative paintings of white men. But I also do landscapes - that's part of me, too."
 One of the important topics take up at the Metropolitan Museum symposium was the black "nonvisual tradition."
 "Basically," said William T. Williams, a painter and recent graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, "we come from a nonvisual culture or people. There haven't been that many visual arts - painting, sculpture - exposed to the black community itself."
 Most participants on the panel thought the reasons were economic. Mr. Gilliam, a well-known and highly regarded Washington painter, noted:
 "We've been prevented from being visual-minded because we've had to be so industrial-minded. How are you going to think about things like art when it's all you can do to get any kind of job?"
 Mr. Bearden, moderating the symposium, had a different view. "They say that abstract expressionism - action painting - is the first indigenous American art, exported and imitated by artists around the world. No critic that I have read has aligned this spark with jazz music. But that's the feeling you get from it: involvement, personality, improvisation, rhythm, color. Black culture is far more into the whole fabric of American life than we realize."
 Negro artists today also complain that when the white art world does notice the, it is only on a "token" basis.
 "No one is really interested in what the black artists paints about," says William Majors, a well-known black print-maker who is chairman of the art department at Orange County Community College. "We have something to say. We say it quite beautifully, but no one's interested in our esthetic. They're interested in our blackness."
 Though Negroes do find more and more teaching jobs available to them at art schools and universities, there are still complaints about other forms of prejudice: the unwillingness of art schools to present Negro and historical African material; the exclusion of Negroes from professional art societies, the lack of opportunity for them to participate in the big national and international shows, and their scanty representation in the city's major museums. 
 "There's only one Negro in any curatorial position," one Negro artist commented bitterly. (Kynaston McShine, a Dartmouth-trained art historian, who is associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.) "The rest have made it - as museum guards."
 (There are two other Negroes of more than guard status in new city museum jobs. Henri Ghent is director of the Brooklyn Museum's Community Gallery, and Betty Blayton, a young painter, is executive director of "The Children's Art Carnival in Harlem," soon to be opened by the Museum of Modern Art.)

Sculptor's Observation
 But Richard Hunt, a well-known Negro sculptor who works in Chicago, said at the Metropolitan symposium:
 "The problem of the Negro in terms of the contemporary situation in art "seems to be more or less tied up with the prevailing currents in art itself. For instance, an artist who's working with kinetic, light or minimal things might have a better chance of breaking into the scene than somebody who's painting figuratively. All these things don't really seem that much different from the problems that white artists or any other kinds of artists have."
 Many Negro artists feel that their small representation in the major galleries has less to do with discrimination than the fact that they are not active in the proper society scene where important transactions are conducted.
 But whether they find buyers for their work or not, what most black artists - like white artists - want is recognition, to be judged esthetically.
 "racial hang-ups are extraneous to art," Raymond Saunders has said. "No artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art - the living root and the ever-growing esthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experience. Can't we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?"

[[image 1 ]] caption: Painting from Raymond Saunders's recent one-man show at an East Side gallery. Mr. Saunders, a Negro, decries the current vogue for group shows of works by black artists. Credit: The New York Times

[[image 2]] caption: Kynaston McShine Credit: The New York Times Studio
[[image 3]] caption: Henri Ghent Credit: Ra Cantu

Playwrights Unit Purchases a Home On the East Side

 The Playwright Unit, headed by Edward Albee, Richard Barr and Charles Woodward has bought a building at 83 East Fourth Street, where new plays will be tested.
 The nonprofit group paid the owner, Mrs. Hannah Griboff, $77,000 for the building and will take possession in May. Mr. Woodward, who is , with Mr. Barr, the producer of the "The Boys in the Band," said the money had been advanced by both of them and by Mr. Albee, the League of New York Theaters.
 The three men are putting on a Broadway revival of "The Front Page" in May. Profits will go towards the maintenance of the unit. The organization gives new dramatists an opportunity to see their scripts presented on a professional basis without the commercial pressure of paid public performances and newspaper criticism.
 The building, which will be called the Playwrights Unit, is now used by the New Dramatists Committee, a nonprofit group that also trains playwrights. Extensive alterations are planned, according to Charles Gnys, managing director of the Playright Unit. Formed in 1961, the unit has given 83 new plays trial productions in Off Broadway houses.

DeLaurentiis Buys 'Valachi' Film Rights
By A. H. Weiler

 Peter Maas has sold the film rights to the "The Valachi Papers," which he wrote, to Dino de Laurentiis, the Italian producer. The purchase price, Mr. Maas said, is $200,000 plus 5 per cnet of the picture's profits, and includes his services as technical consultant and work on the screen treatment. 
 The film version of the book, which details the criminal activities of the Mafia as seen by Jospeh M. Valachi, an informer who is now serving a life sentence for murder, will be made as an English-language feature. The movie will be filmed mostly on location here and elsewhere on the East Coast. 
 The acquisition of the book by an Italian producer follows protests by various Italian-American groups and, Mr. Maas said, "the fact that it was the only book the Federal Government tried to supress before publication."
"The idea is not to malign Italians," he continued. "The idea is not so much to do the story of the mobster, who, under the threat of death by his Cosa Nostra superiors turned Government informer, but more a movie about a particular man defying both his establishment and the Government."
The Department of Justice permitted Mr. Valachi to write his memoirs in 1965 Mr. Mass said. "I was given permission to work on this book with him since I had done the first story on him in The Saturday Evening Post in 1963. But then protests began coming in to the effect that the book would give Italian-Americans a bad image."
Among the protestors was group of 12 Italian-Americans, who, through their spokesman, Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said the publication of the book would be "disatrous and scandalous." Another organization, the Columbus Lodge of the Order of Sons of Italy of Massapequa, L. I., said it "depicts the Italians as criminals."
In May, 1966, the department filed suit to stop publication, maintaining, among other things, that it had the right under its agreement with Mr. Maas to decide against publication.
"But my contention, then and now," he said, "is that 'The Valachi Papers' is the story of crooks, not Italians."
Ralph Serpe, a local associate of Mr. de Laurentiis who is to participate in the production of the film, said that the producer was in Sardinia filming "Kidnapped," an Italian movie, and could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Valachi, who is 64 years old, is receiving a percentage of the royalties from the book and is sharing in its sale to the movies, Mr. Sepe said. "But I can't reveal either figure." The book published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in December, has sold more than 47,000 copies since publication, he added.
[[image 1]] caption: Joseph M. Valachi
[[image 2]] caption: Peter Maas

[[ 25 images on second half of page 34]]