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E NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 1963. 

Art: 15 Exhibit at Modern

'Americans 1963' Is Gadgety Collection of Current Painting and Sculpture

By JOHN CANADAY

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Americans 1963," which opens today, brings 15 painters and sculptors together in small one-man shows. Planned to illustrate current contrasting points of view-always omitting, of course, any point of view tainted by tradition-it is a gadgety and gimmicky collection, discouragings if you apply anything like a conventional high standard but bright and giddy enough if you concur in the museum's apparent contention that what is best in American art is necessarily what most closely approaches a kind of esthetic circus.

This is a generality, and immediate exceptions must be made for several of the artists chosen for nomination to immortality. The museum always makes a point in these periodic exhibitions that these are nominations only, but one wonders sometimes whether the nominating committee of one, Dorothy C. Miller, should have her title of Director of the Exhibition, or be called Fashion Editor, which she impresses me as being.

"The artists lead-we follow," the museum intones whenever its selection is questioned, thus assuming a safe position where it can have things both ways, getting credit later for inclusions that pan out well while supplying built-in absolution for any errors of judgement. This is irritating, since the museum by exhibiting any artist launches him into prominence and must recognize that the public cannot accept its choices as tentative but as definitive. 

It would be impossible for any young American artist working in conventional techniques to get into one of these shows. But an utterly inconsequential painted of colored stripes like David Simpson, here included, ir a conscientious experimenter with essentially elementary color theories like Richard Anuskiewicz are launched on careers.

This year's exhibition recognizes pop art, which by rumor is a distressing development to the museum. Robert Indiana, already stale, has a bright show. Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, with their romantic morbidities oddly bred with a base kind of realism, are the other pop choices. They look, as a matter of fact, extremely vigorous, and exemplify the double virtue of pop art, which combines maximum vulgarity with maximum opportunity for esoteric interpretation. But this is an art from which something less vulgar and less prostituted through jargon might develop.

Among the other artists, an arresting combination is provided by Edward Higgins, the sculptor, and Ad Reinhardt, the painter. In his comments on his work, Mr. Higgins, who is probably the best artist in the show and could be the best in a show several times the size, says, "I have not thought about art in years; I feel more like a witch doctor."

I think Mr. Higgins is fooling himself or talking through his hat. He is a first-rate artist as well as a most satisfying technician. His very brief statement indicaties that he knows that the artist's job is to do, rather than to talk.

In contrast, Ad Reinhardt talks on for four pages and exhibits only solid black canvases. They are not solid black when you look closely enough, of course, and as a matter of fact they are not quite so dence as spots in his prose, which alternates between the totally obvious and the totally obscure. This is all very curious, not only because talking seems to have replaced painting completely, but because Mr. Reinhardt in various work during his career-he is no newcomer-has made sense and has painted well.

Among other artists are Sally Hazelet Drummond, whose impeccably pointillist art, consisting of what must be nearly millions of little dots, is an abstract conclusion to Seurat's pictures. It is an example of means shirnking to an end, but invested nonetheless with a most agreeable, scintillating quietness. Another is Chryssa, who also uses such elements as letters and newspapers as the material of ornamental panels that communicate-somewhat-by evocation.

With a blind spot for the sculpture of Gabriel Kohn, I might best not comment on it. But surely anyone can see that Michael Lekakis's sculpture is only an inferior kind of driftwood, crooked root or other natural form debauched rather than revealed in the modifications he inflicts. Jason Seley's automobile bumpers are sufficiently ornamental tag-enders to the junksculpture fad.

In addition to Mr. Higgins's sculpture, the solidest contributions to this exhibition are Richard Lindner's sinister convocations of figures, Lee Bontecou's familiar contraptions,  and Marisol's wonderfully satirical, elegantly witty, expertly designed inventions, part sculpture and part drawing.

This is a good percentage of good work in the tradition of these exhibitions, but in spite of it one leaves "Americans 1963" with the sensation of having found at last the answer to the 30-year-old question of what ever happened to vaudeville. It moved into the Museum of Modern Art.