It's Spring in Connecticut, and New Talent Blooms

One thing immediately apparent in “Contemporary Reflections,” the summer show at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., is that there's a lot of very good painting and sculpture around by artists whose names you never heard of. The 70 selected by Carlus Dyer, the museum's director, have no dealers (or hadn't, until some were picked up as a result of inclusion in this, the fifth version of an annual event), which means little chance of exposure except for the one in a thousand that lands them in a show of this exceptional kind.

Mr. Dyer's selection was made on the basis of slides sent in for preliminary weeding‐out of candidates, followed by visits to the studios of the most promising. The practical geographical limitation to the area between Boston and Washington put several hundred otherwise eligible artists out of the running. For, as anyone knows who has visited the college art departments where painters and sculptors spawned in the big schools are spawning mare and more in an uninhibited explosion of the artist population, the level of talent and technical agility continues to rise steadily while consumption diminishes in proportion to the productive flood.

“Contemporary Reflections,” as the title hints, sets out to summarize the ramifications of what is currently, and happily, a diversified scene, running from the deviously esoteric to the deliberately banal, from the mathematical to the impulsive. Inevitably, a few selections are too close to their touted models. It seems to me, for instance,. that it is no longer necessary to drape yards of felt on a wall in the manner of Robert Morris some years ago. But in general these young artists are making intelligent and imaginative application of a dozen or so movements now current and viable.

The one direction that is short‐changed is objective realism, but this might be because it is so popular and so salable at the moment that most of its expert practitioners have found dealers. The median age of the 70 artists is around 30, with the roster divided about half and half between men and women. Without having been cad enough to ask whether this reflected a concession to Women's Liberation pressures, I found that when I came to making up my own list of awards (a gratuitous exercise, since no awards are offered) it was, indeed, Ladies’ Day. Four of my six favorites, including the choice for top place, Sandra Gross's “Tao Series 4,” were by women, a spontaneous vote of confidence since I visited the exhibition before it opened and labels were not yet affixed.

“Tao Series 4” is a beautiful painting that raises a serious question. Seven‐and‐a‐half feet high and ten feet wide, it exists as a single delieate area without dramatic accents, a subtly unified surface more like a page from a hook, in spirit, than the wall‐sized composition that it is, making use of collage, impasto, stains and semi‐calligraphic squiggles against a background almost imperceptibly divided into rectangular sections. On either side, two large forms, like ghosts of the ancient trumpet‐shaped Chinese bronze ritual vessel called ku, invest the painting with echoes of ceremonial functions. The tonal values are so close that they virtually disappear in a photograph —hence no illustration here.

The question is, what can you do with a painting of this size, if you aren't a museum and don't live in an enormous house? I know that one enthusiastic prospective purchaser went back to New York to check the dimensions of what he thought was the perfect spot in his study, and found the union impossible. Maybe, as one solution to the producer‐consumer imbalance, painters who work in big, airy studios should contract into the dimensions of a New York apartment in order to develop a sense of salable scale.

The other five works that appealed to me most were Cora Cohen's “Tournai,” a large painting that, without intending irreverence. I can best describe as raising the esthetic level of spotbleached blue‐jeans to that of serious abstract art; Dee Shapiro's “Support Systems I and II” done with ink‐marking crayons on graph paper, organizing, by my approximation, 240,000 units into a geometrical pattern based on logarithmic functions; Timmie Ogdon's “The Secret of Controlling the Weather,” a dense but playful surrealist assemblage of innumerable small objects dangerously skirting, but successfully avoiding, the edge of the overfamiliar; William Monaghan's “Rusting Assemblage V,” which turned out to be not a painting but nature's own pattern of rust on a canvas that had been rolled around a metal core and kept dampened for months; and Masaaki Sato's “Subway Station,” a tour‐de‐force of illusionistic perspective that answers in the affirmative the question as to whether or not anything could be done to make our subways more nightmarish than they already are.

The Aldrich Museum, occupying an 18th‐century house designated as an historic landmark on the outside, is transformed on the inside into what seems a building about four times its size with no conflict between its dedication to contemporary art and its landmark status. In back of the house there stretches a lengthy garden where appropriate selections from the museum's permanent sculpture collection are installed in an ideal setting of grass and greenery.

Definitely worth the trip one CT these Saturdays or Sundays.