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'FAMILY GROUP,' a collage by Romare Bearden, is on  exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom. It was produced last year.

U.S. PLANS SHIFTS IN BIENNALE ROLE

Workshop to Be Highlight at Venice Art Fair

By GRACE GLUECK
The United States is planning a drastic change in the type of exhibition it will present at this June's Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious of the international art fairs.
Instead of the usual 8-or-10 man "star" show, chosen to reflect trends in current United States painting and sculpture, it expects to present a workshop in graphic arts, plus an exhibition of some 50 or 60 contemporary prints.
"We're looking for an opportunity to bring artists from many countries together for work and the exchange of ideas," said Lois Bingham, director of the International Arts Program, a division of the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Arts, which sponsors United States participation in the Biennale. "And we would like to place more emphasis on creativity rather than the commercial end product."
Shift In Emphasis
Dealers are expected to play far less of a role in the proposed new program. In 1966 the United States representation at the Biennale consisted of paintings by four artists represented by top Madison Avenue dealers: Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein. In 1968 it comprised a far more conservative roster of 10 painters and sculptors including Reuben Nakian, Edwin Dickinson, Fairfield Porter, Richard [[cut off]]

Black Experience and Modernist Art

Romare Bearden Uses Photos in Collages

Malcolm X Is Subject of Barbara Riboud

By HILTON KRAMER
THE collage paintings of Romare Bearden, with their fragmented images of Negro life locked into an elegant cubist design, are fairly well known on the New York art scene. The sculptures of Barbara Chase Riboud, including her four abstract "Monuments to Malcolm X," are new to New York. Yet the works of both of these black American artists–the one a well established figure, the other a young expatriate living in France–raise some interesting questions about the relation of black experience to modernist forms of painting and sculpture.
Mr. Bearden is currently showing 24 collage paintings at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street. One of them is called "Frozen Moment," and this is a title that could appropriately be applied to nearly all of Mr. Bearden's pictures. For there is in most of these pictures a sense of a scene, an act, or a group momentarily arrested in its course–and a sense, too, of fragments momentarily given this particular arrangement. The arrangement is very assured; Mr. Bearden is a strong designer. The images are compelling. But they nonetheless convey a sense of flux that makes each "frozen moment" seem temporary and contingent.

Mr. Bearden uses a great many photographic fragments in his collages. He also occasionally uses pictorial fragments of African masks in a sort of montage synthesis with contemporary black figures. There is an interesting idea at work in the use of these African mask motifs–a suggestion of the morphology of certain forms that derive originally from African art, then passed into modern art by way of cubism, and now being employed to evoke a mode of Afro-American experience.
Yet the idea, though an interesting one, is not, I think, given as powerful an expression as the visual materials lead one to expect. There is something a little to decorative in Mr. Bearden's work, something a little too pat, for the emotions that are not so much stated as implied in his imagery. This imagery seems to call for a stronger form and a more robust expression than it is usually given.
Mrs. Riboud is currently showing her work at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, 41 East 57th Street. Though trained in the United States–at Temple and Yale Universities – she has lived abroad since 1961, and her work bears all the marks of a certain mode of Parisian sensibility. There is a very French refinement in these abstract bronzes–which is to say, an overrefinment–that is, to my eyes at least, emotionally at odds with the provocative themes announced in her titles. (Announced in the catalogue too–the sculpfor whose work could live up to the quotations from Rimbaud and Eldridge Cleaver in the catalogue would be very hard to imagine.)
This discrepancy between form and motif is especially evident in the four "monuments to Malcolm X" – wall-hanging sculptures of considerable elegance that unfortunately suggest the ambience of high fashion rather more than they suggest the theme of heroic suffering and social conflict. Mrs. Riboud is a sculptor of real gifts; she has an impressive command of her medium. But I think the particular sculptural style she has chosen for her difficult themes would have defeated greater artists than herself. She has not yet found a style equal to her ambition.
Other exhibitions include the following:
The Protean Century: 1870-1970 (Knoedler, 14 East 57th Street): This is an extremely enjoyable loan exhibition, organized as a benefit for the acquisitions fund of the Hopkins Center Art Galleries at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N. H. The works are drawn from the Dartmouth College Collection, and from the collections of alumni and friends of the college. There is no admission charge.
The exhibition is, in effect, a fragmentary survey of modern art, American as well as European, and includes many delightful examples of all the famous names. A very pleasant show to visit in this particular setting.