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"LIFE" - NEW YORK EDITION
DECEMBER 29, 1962

ART

Hits for the Holiday...

Though upstaged by that enigmatic lady from the Louvre in Paris, who is now keeping cool (62 Degrees F.) in a vault at the National Gallery, New York museums have put on their own fine shows for the holidays. A masterpiece (left, top), painted in the 16th Century by the dutchman Jan Mostaert, was borrowed from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Some 70 medieval manuscripts were transported from the Paris home of art dealer Georges Wildenstein for exhibit at The Cloisters. And collections all over the U.S. have loaned Asia House a fabulous assortment of Muslim manuscripts (second from top).
Elsewhere, American artists monopolized the scene. The Whitney Museum's show is a catch-all of sculptural talents -- and the catch, by and large, is good. Much of the work is abstract, made from unconventional materials like fiberglass, epoxy, neon tubes. But an unabstract woman in a conventional barrel is one of the showstoppers (second from bottom). The woman, carved by Marisol, portrays Ruth Kligman whose abstractions (bottom) are now on view at the Thibaut Gallery. 
Two newcomers, James Gill and Gerald van de Wiele, look to be the latest hits, commercially and critically. Gill, a 28-year-old Texan showing at the Alan Gallery, has conjured up a flashy species of hollow-eyed men an women framed by their cars. Van de Wiele, a 30-year-old Detroiter at the Castelli Gallery, paints rich-hued abstractions which evoke a world of frut, peacocks, Oriental shawls.  
Where there's art, there's talk -- and the past fortnight has had plenty of it. A symposium on Pop Art at the Modern Museum was lively but inconclusive. The movement, specializing in images derived from ads, comic strips and other commonplace items, was praised by one critic as "the new landscape painting," condemned by another as  little more than a "nine days' wonder." A later symposium at the Guggenheim Museum went completely to pieces. Addressing themselves to "The Problem of Junk Sculpture," panelists started out on a lofty level of "spatial values," "nostalgic materials," the "form in formlessness." But torpedoed by a rebellious sculptor, the discussion veered off into hamburgers, Plato and President Kennedy. Insults flew, the audience hooted and the moderator, shattered by the shambles, junked the whole symposium. 

DOROTHY SEIBERLING

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MAGI IN BROOKLYN. Adoration by Mostaert was painted about 1520.

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MUSLIM MYSTIC. Around 1600, artist drew figure hunched in thought.

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FIVE-IN-ONE. Marisol used barrel as common body for quintuple portrain.

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CRYPTIC CONTOURS. Kligman calls this work Coney Island Baby.

A melancholy Armenian came in for acclaim last week -- 14 years too late -- when some 120 works by Arshile Gorky (opposite page) went on display at the Museum of Modern Art. The artist was not on hand for the celebration. He had committed suicide in Connecticut in 1948 at the age of 44 -- a victim, said a friend, of "unrequited art."
Gorky came to the US when he was 16. Through decades of poverty he worked fiercely to evolve his tenuous lines and cavorting forms (above) that evoke both mood and matter. Largely ignored until the 1950s, he is now esteemed as a major pioneer of abstraction.

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FAMILIAR FACES. Photo (left) of Gorky, aged 8, and his mother inspired 1930s portrait whose flattened figures retain wistful look.

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FANCIFUL FORMS. Capering shapes of Garden in Sochi (top) contrast with somber tones and careening lines of Gorky's last painting.